


Project Lazarus

by architeuthis



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Breathplay, Canon-Typical Violence, Dubious Consent, M/M, Manual Restraint, Mutually Compromised Consent, Nefarious Science Jell-O Wrestling Championship Bout, Post-Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Resurrection, Romance, Rough Sex, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 02:01:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14823089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis
Summary: The theft of Superman's body leads Bruce to a plot that needs unraveling, and a second chance.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [[ART] Project Lazarus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14822792) by [liodain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liodain/pseuds/liodain). 



> Written for the Superbat Reversebang, for a prompt by the amazing [Liodain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain), which you can feast your eyes on [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14822792/chapters/34302047)!
> 
> The mutually compromised consent in some of the sex in this story is of roughly the type and degree you might expect in an accidental sex pollen scenario (though this is not an accidental sex pollen scenario). The rest of the sex is straightforwardly consensual.

Bruce knew what he'd find here. He had thought that was the same as being prepared for it.

The body lay on a steel table as though in state. A hanging bulb with a metal shade lit its still face harshly from above; in the shadows around it, desks full of electronics and racks full of equipment crowded like mourners. Some knee-height tank of fluid bubbled in the dark.

A breath scraped in Bruce's throat. He walked past the table and the corpse, to one of the workstations. It hummed to life when he touched the keyboard; he groped for the armrest of the nearest chair and sat. When he trusted his hands, he ejected a thumb drive from a compartment on his gauntlet and inserted it into the port on the keyboard. The system opened up for him in stages, like a flower. LexCorp hadn't updated their encryption protocols since Luthor's arrest.

His field of vision just barely excluded the table and the body. If he turned his head he'd see the symbol glowing under the single light, the velvety red spill of the cape where it hung off the edge of the table. He caught himself clicking through documents without seeing them, and forced his hand to slow.

What he'd opened were the notes of a Dr. Rasamala, which chronicled a day's worth of failed attempts to get a tissue sample, using progressively sharper instruments made of progressively harder materials. Rasamala knew about the Kryptonian rock and his postscripts were mostly grousing about his inability to lay hands on a sample. Either Bruce's six-month shakedown of LexCorp holdings and the black market really had recovered all of it, or this Rasamala was too low on the totem pole to requisition some.

Probably the former. If Rasamala was important enough for someone to steal Superman's corpse for him, he was important enough to get his hands on a rock.

Venturing upward into the site-wide documentation pool presented Bruce with such a welter of information that he backed out at once. He'd come here to accomplish one thing; parsing through all this could wait. He checked in with the CCTV system to make sure the night crew was still sleeping soundly in the various bathrooms and broom closets where he'd left them on the way in, then slapped a slash-and-burn data leech on the workstation and let it get to the business of gutting the servers. The memos Bruce had opened vanished one by one as the leech devoured them. There would be offsite backups, but this might set LexCorp back a little, at least. Though not as much as stealing the corpse back would.

Jesus. It couldn't go in the ground again. The Kent plot in Smallville's cemetery was obviously compromised. Bruce would have to find somewhere—

The leech's rapid archaeology of the notes onscreen exposed one that snagged Bruce's gaze. He read it without meaning to, in the quarter-second before the window vanished.

 _90% sure just dunking the entire body in the tank would work_ , it said in a postscript _. Only 4% sure he'd give me a cell sample in exchange for bringing him back to life. Still better odds than tungsten carbide._

__

Bruce lunged for the mouse, but it was futile. That note was now compressed and encrypted on his own leech. He'd read it again at the cave or not at all.

__

The body lay on the table as though in state. The tank bubbled in the dark. The pulse in Bruce's ears thundered as he rose from his chair.

__

It wouldn't work.

__

Bruce shoved aside two equipment racks. One of them rattled with what could have been surgical or torture implements, each labeled with its material composition and effectiveness: _No. No. No. Nope. No. Nyet._ The tank lurked at the far end of the room. Cables snaked from it to the wall.

__

It wouldn't work. He needed more information before he tried anything. He had the opportunity now to take samples and pore over Rasamala's research at his leisure.

__

In the dimness of the lab, Bruce ran his hands around the rim of the the tank until he found the releases on its lid. The scent that rose to him when he folded it back was mineral, chemical, unfamiliar. When he flipped the switch next to the power cable, the bottom of the tank came aglow. Its contents were grassy green in the light, and viscous; each bubble that rose through them escaped with a substantial _pop_.

__

It wouldn't work. Even the best outcome probably lead to Bruce's death.

__

It wouldn't work.

__

Bruce strode back to the table where the body lay. His step slowed as he approached. The corpse's face was pale in the light overhead, its jaw and cheekbones stark. A long curved rent in the suit showed where the fatal wound would be, but the alien fabric lay decorously closed over it. The suit had disappeared from its display case in the Smithsonian a week ago, so Bruce had tightened security at the cave, put the word out, checked in on a few tracking devices. The Superman tracker hadn't begun to move until last night.

__

It still glowed on Bruce's gauntlet display. He tapped the screen to cancel, then pulled off his glove as well, and reached for the transponder.

__

The texture of Clark's hair on his fingertips stopped him.

__

He hadn't expected it to be soft. He'd been wearing a glove when he placed the transponder all those months ago — on the scalp, where it was unlikely to be found or tampered with. And at the time ... it was before he'd ever considered what Clark's hair would feel like, if he were to slip his hand into it.

__

He reached deeper, until he felt the bump of the transponder a few inches above the nape of Clark's neck. The chilly curve of Clark's skull rested in his palm. Bruce's chest ached; he couldn't remember if he'd deflected a bullet with it on the way in here. He pushed back his cowl, but it didn't ease his breathing.

__

The transponder came free with a tug. Clark's head lolled away from Bruce on the unforgiving surface of the steel table. Motionless, Clark looked like a sculpture of himself — he'd had that quality in life as well — but moving like that, slackly, he was nothing but a dead body.

__

Bruce got his arm beneath Clark's shoulders, pushed his other hand under Clark's knees. He felt heavier than even a man of his size should have, when Bruce lifted him from the table. He'd felt that way in the wreckage of the Gotham docks, too, when Bruce had closed Clark's eyes and bundled him in his own cape. His arms hung loose; with nothing to support his head, his throat made a familiar pale arch.

__

It wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. Bruce didn't know how to activate the tank. It wouldn't work.

__

He first tried to lower Clark directly into the liquid, but gave that up as impossibly awkward. If he was doing this, he might as well do it. Bruce stepped into the tank. Pale green light welled up around Clark's features, snuck through the gaps between his arms and his sides. Bruce sank slowly to his knees, and the weight in his arms eased as the liquid in the tank took it from him. It was warm, he discovered when it infiltrated his boots.

__

Clark's feet were submerged, then his thighs and hands, then his torso, his shoulders, his neck. Nothing. Nothing was going to happen. Bruce had always known that. He held Clark's face between his hands, one gloved and one bare, and eased him down below the surface. His hair floated about his head. He had been so beautiful.

__

Something stirred at the tear in Clark's suit. Bruce glanced down, expecting to see it moving in the currents he'd kicked up, or to find a bubble caught on the flap. Instead there was a twist of green in the tank fluid there, a more-opaque ribbon that emerged from beneath the flap like a dribble of blood into water — or like something that had searched for the gap in Clark's suit and entered it.

__

Another formed at Clark's hand, then more, faster, around his face, his neck, the tops of his boots. Bruce felt the currents of the fluid change around his own bare hand; on its way to Clark, a spiraling cone of green brushed the backs of his fingers like a curious fish. The color leeched itself out of the tank fluid. It sought Clark out like it had been waiting for him, funneling into his skin, into his mouth, into his wounds, until the bubbles around them tumbled through a liquid clear as water.

__

A tremor ran through the body. Movement at the tear in the suit caught Bruce's eye again; this time he yanked the flap aside, just in time to watch the wound finish closing.

__

He was still staring when Clark hooked his hand over the edge of the tank, jerked his face above the surface of the liquid and took a long, tearing breath.

__

Bruce tried to recoil, but the side of the tank stopped him. Another reflex, just as unthinking, brought his gloveless right hand up toward Clark's neck as though to look for his pulse. Without both of Bruce's hands bracing him, Clark slipped back under; he pulled himself up again for a second huge gulp of air without ever seeming to have exhaled.

__

At last Clark's wet-lashed eyes opened. His gaze found Bruce's bare, dripping hand first, but bounced away from it to the ceiling, the wall, the dubiously ethical equipment that surrounded them, before landing at last on Bruce's face. Bruce knew the moment Clark recognized him by the fury and terror that twisted his expression.

__

Bruce could see how this would look suspicious to someone who had, like Clark, only just arrived on the scene.

__

He had no time to soothe or placate. Clark's hand closed on his throat and then Bruce was on his back at the bottom of the tank. The liquid met itself with an audible _slap_ when it closed over his face. Clark hadn't been fast like this when they fought in Gotham: he had been holding back, tossing Bruce around for sport, and then he had been hobbled by lungfuls of radioactive dust.

__

It seemed that this time he was just going to kill Bruce outright. His thumb explored Bruce's neck, like he was looking for the place that would make the most satisfying snap. His hand was hot against the bare underside of Bruce's jaw — already he was warm through, warmer than the chemical bath they lay in.

__

Bruce tried to bring a knee to bear; Clark ignored it. Bruce tried to punch him in the throat; Clark blocked it almost before the motion began, and shoved Bruce's wrist down to the floor of the tank. He did it with the same hand he'd been using to choke Bruce an instant ago, rather than release his hold on the tank's lip. Only his restrained wrist and Clark's obstructing body held Bruce down now, and he could at least lean up enough to break the surface of the liquid they were in and gasp for breath.

__

Clark's face was inches away. Fighting him in these circumstances was impossible. Playing dead guaranteed nothing. Talking him down required time and an uncompromised airway.

__

Straining against his immobilized wrist, Bruce stretched up those last few inches and kissed Clark's snarling mouth.

__

Clark's face relaxed. Bruce hooked his free hand around the back of Clark's neck and one foot behind his knee. He pulled their bodies flush, and kissed Clark with every ounce of passion he could muster for an unresponsive man who might kill him in a few seconds. He kissed Clark like his life depended on it.

__

Astonishment or distraction loosened Clark's hold on Bruce's wrist. Clark made no move to recapture Bruce's hand when it slipped free, just groped vaguely through the tank around them like he was trying to decipher the shape of it. Good. This had bought Bruce a few seconds, maybe jarred Clark out of his rage enough to talk. Clark was no killer; if he could listen to reason at all, he would listen to reason. Maybe Bruce could even wriggle out of the tank unscathed to discuss this from a more impersonal distance; he hadn't expected Clark to be so flummoxed as to go slack like this —

__

— and not in his deepest strategic mind, not in his wildest imaginings, had he thought Clark might cup the back of his head with the same hand he'd nearly used to snap Bruce's neck, and answer his kiss in kind.

__

A fire Bruce had worked hard to smother flared back to life in him. Clark kissed Bruce like it was Bruce he meant to be kissing, like a lucid man in the arms of someone he wanted — not a man very recently returned from death who had, a moment ago, seemed to have no idea what was going on. Clark kissed him without fumbling or hesitation and Bruce felt his reason bend under the strain of how much he wanted to believe it.

__

Enough. Time to pull the plug. Bruce made to kick away and hoist himself up over the edge of the tank, but Clark took the shifting of Bruce's weight as an invitation to hook an arm around him and pull their bodies back together. He caught Bruce's thigh between his own and entangled their legs to keep it there.

__

In his insulated suit, submerged in warm liquid, pressed against the solar furnace body of an alien, Bruce shivered head to toe. Christ, Clark was strong. He might have let slip some little sound into Clark's mouth — he had never quite convinced himself to stop kissing Clark — and Clark moaned back into his, in quick broken rumbles that reverberated strangely inside the tank. Maybe it was a trick of the acoustics that made Clark sound so desperate, like he wanted to kiss Bruce but he _had_ to moan, and his compromise was to alternate between these activities as rapidly as he could.

__

Bruce didn't know if Clark's mind was intact. He didn't know if this was, meaningfully, Clark. He didn't know if this was _factually_ Clark, and not some other intelligence animating his body. He didn't know if this was _happening_. The possibility that the fluid in the tank was a contact hallucinogen snaked through his mind: it would make more sense for none of this to be happening than for any of it to be happening, let alone all of it.

__

If this was a hallucination, it wouldn't matter if he touched Clark.

__

He shouldn't flirt with that idea. That wasn't an excuse, not even with Clark's tongue in his mouth, not even with his leg between Clark's and Clark's between his so that he felt Clark's body shift and press against him every time either of them moved.

__

Fuck it. He doubted he could put the brakes on this now anyway. Bruce let his bare hand slip under Clark's wet cloak and down the slope of his shoulder blades, up the dip of his waist, over the curve of his ass. His Kryptonian suit had exactly the sort of indecipherable texture Bruce would have expected an alien fabric to have — a layer of something membrane-thin and slick over a layer of something with a pebbly surface, which moved independently of each other under Bruce's hand. And beneath that, the tectonic shifting of the muscles of Clark's back as he ground down against Bruce.

__

Jesus, was Clark hard? Would he be hard already, the way Bruce was right now, throbbing uncomfortably against whatever groin protection his suit offered? The cup in Bruce's own suit kept him from feeling Clark through it. Maybe this friction was _getting_ him hard, and God, how Bruce wanted to feel that process unfold against his body. Clark's shaky exhalation fluttered against Bruce's mouth. Their faces were so close Bruce couldn't see whether Clark's eyes were open.

__

Clark's fingertips scraped the back of Bruce's suit. His nails caught briefly in a seam, then lost it and slid away: by design, the surface of the suit was difficult to get a grip on even when it was dry. Clark tried again, with both hands this time. His intention became clear at the same moment that he found purchase. Something popped.

__

Before Clark could tear the suit in half to get at him, Bruce slipped his ungloved hand down between their bodies. Distraction had worked last time.

__

Correction: Clark's suit had no groin protector. Bruce felt the outline of Clark's hard cock unmistakably through the strange clingy material of his suit, pressed between Clark's stomach and the crook of Bruce's own hip — and he felt, as clearly as though he had made contact skin to skin, how Clark's erection jerked and his hips twitched at the touch. Bruce shoved his hand farther into the space between them so he could cup Clark's cock, squeeze it.

__

It was the first thing that had induced Clark to stop kissing Bruce for more than an instant; he reared back with a gasp, sending the liquid in the tank slapping against its sides. On reflex Bruce chased him upward out of the chemical bath, seeking his mouth again; he kissed the corner of it, then Clark's jaw, his dripping chin, his throat.

Clark hiked Bruce's leg higher over his hip and thrust against Bruce's hand. It was neither a skillful nor an elegant handjob, but Bruce it was at least bound to be better than how Clark had spent spent the last year and a half. Their suits slid against each other easily in the tank fluid, but the two textures created a vibration Bruce could faintly hear, and feel pleasantly through his groin cup. This would work. Clark would come like this, hopefully soon — hopefully moaning into Bruce's mouth, hopefully grinding into his body, hopefully pulsing into his hand. Maybe when he'd cooled down he'd be lucid enough for conversation and able to leave this place with a little decorum. And Bruce would — jerk off later, when he'd escaped the prison of his own suit. And for the rest of his life, probably, thinking about Clark throwing his head back, the rivulets down his neck, his hips flexing.

One of Clark's hands groped at the back of Bruce's suit again. He yanked Bruce closer and kissed him anew; Bruce hoped that would be all, but Clark's fingers hooked like they had before, seeking real purchase. So much for that. Fuck. Fuck. Bruce preferred to leave this place with an intact suit.

All right. Bruce's gloved hand was hooked around the back of Clark's neck, and had been doing most of the work of keeping him from sinking down to the bottom of the tank. With Clark more or less holding him now, he could let go. He shoved his hand under the very base of his own cape, looking for the catch that held the zipper pull of his suit in place. In this position he could only pull it down so far — back at the cave he had a tool just for this — but Clark's hand sought out this new activity, and he caught on at once when he felt the gap growing at the back of the Batsuit.

He pushed two fingers between the teeth of the zipper and forced the pull all the way down, drawing a slow line down Bruce's spine through his undersuit as he did. Another full-body shudder radiated outward from the touch. The fluid in the tank hadn't made inroads much past the limbs and neck of Bruce's suit, but with the back zipper open it flooded in. When Clark's fingers hit the waist of the undersuit, the gap between its top and bottom halves, they reversed course and slid upward beneath it, Clark's bare skin to Bruce's.

Bruce made a surrendering sound in his throat, and punched the release on his utility belt.

The hem of Bruce's undershirt could only go up so far with the outer suit on top of it. Clark pushed it up a little farther than that, cutting Bruce uncomfortably across the chest with its hem, for what seemed ultimately to be no reason other than to run his splayed fingers down Bruce's back. They caught on each each vertebral bump, each crisscrossing scar.

This might be a good time to try to _talk_ to Clark. If he was handling Bruce like this, touching him with such clear intent instead of just rubbing off on him like a half-asleep man trying to scratch an itch, he might be able to converse.

He might also stop. And talking would _require_ him to stop kissing Bruce — kissing him the way he was doing right now, openmouthed and endless. Even stopping to suggest that virtually anywhere on Earth would be a better place for this than here might mean never beginning again.

Intent on that thought, and on Clark's mouth, Bruce didn't catch the significance of Clark's hand reaching his waist again until he felt the last few inches of his back zipper snarl open. Clark slid his fingers beneath the waistband of the undersuit's pants, beneath Bruce's boxers, and into the cleft of Bruce's ass.

Bruce jackknifed so hard he nearly slid under the surface of the tank liquid. Clark caught him with his free hand and pulled him back up, pulled their bodies close again; Bruce still grabbed for the sides of the tank with his slippery hands. He knew full well what was in store. Clark pushed his other hand deeper, forcing the back of the suit down until the tension drew the front of the collar uncomfortably tight across Bruce's throat. Until his fingers, as slick as Bruce's were from the liquid in the tank, found their mark, and with no further preamble he slid the tips of two of them into Bruce's ass.

It was more at once than Bruce had expected; he jerked again, and only Clark holding him fast kept him from clocking himself against tank's edge. His heels still scrabbled uselessly against the floor of the tank. His suit was _unbearable_. His trapped erection was no longer uncomfortable, it was agonizing. Clark was investigating Bruce's body with his hands, _Clark_ was doing this, and countless feverish inches of Bruce's skin were functionally insensate under layers of kevlar and fluid armor. He should've let Clark just rip the fucking thing off him.

There seemed to be no danger of that now. Clark pushed his fingers deeper, just past the first knuckle, and when Bruce made a choked sound against his ear, he pressed his face into Bruce's neck and thrust with renewed fervor into the bend of Bruce's hip. This might well be his endgame. Surely he could come like this, if he could feel Bruce as clearly through his suit as Bruce had been able to feel him, and — Jesus, Jesus, just a little deeper and Bruce might be able to come too.

Before Bruce could progress all the way through his speculation about whether Clark would be satisfied to come like this, how he would look, how it would feel, Clark got his knees under himself and rose up above Bruce in the tank. He grabbed a fistful of the _S_ -shield on his chest and — Clark's hand did not move as though to shred his suit, but the front still came apart into ribbons and loops, from his chest to his groin. It wasn't just missing a groin protector: Clark wasn't wearing anything under the suit at all.

Bruce had a good half-second to take in the sight of Clark's cock, red and as chiseledly handsome as the rest of him, before Clark flipped him over. It happened too quickly for Bruce to lodge an objection: Clark slid his fingers free of Bruce's ass and then Bruce was facing the other way. On the one hand, this let Bruce rest on his knees. He'd spent most of this time supported largely by Clark; with his hands on the tank's lip again, he was as stable as he'd been at any point since he'd stepped into this thing.

On the other hand, it definitely meant Clark was about to fuck him.

As many bad ideas as Bruce had either had or indulged since he arrived here, this was the worst of them. He performed a quick mental rundown of all its failings — not least of them that it was barely an idea; it was an urge articulated by the body of a man whose mind might might be damaged or absent — and then pushed his ass up anyway when Clark leaned his body into Bruce's. He couldn't seem to breathe in anything other than gasps. His mouth ached from kissing; he wished he were still kissing Clark right now.

Clark remembered how to open his baffling alien suit. Surely that must be a good sign.

Bruce grabbed the front of his own suit with one hand and extricated his shoulders from it as best he could, which was not too badly, with its interior thoroughly lubricated by the tank's contents. He had a notion of what was in store — and yes, here it was: Clark dragged the back of the suit down until Bruce's ass was free of it. It forced the groin cup down and away from where it was supposed to sit, allowing Bruce's cock to spring at last, excruciatingly, to full erection. He revised what wanted to be a shout of relief down to a hiss.

Clark's hands were still inside Bruce's suit, holding him by the hips and keeping the zipper open wide. He pulled Bruce backward and Bruce felt the hot curve of Clark's cock, first bumping against one cheek of his ass in the tank liquid, then sliding up the cleft between them. He pulled back a little and the head of his cock caught at Bruce's asshole.

More time with Clark's fingers would have been nice for multiple reasons, but Bruce hadn't expected it. He wasn't ready at all, and he didn't give a damn. He reached back and dug his fingers hard into the back of Clark's thigh, and Clark was inside him in four thrusts. Oh God, did it hurt. On the second Clark nailed him so squarely in the prostate that the spasm it sent through Bruce set him skidding off his knees, and he nearly cracked his chin on the edge of the tank. He caught himself with his free hand and pushed back into the third, and Clark nuzzled past Bruce's pushed-back cowl and the wet snarl of material at the base of his cape to mouth at the nape of his neck.

Bruce choked out a long moan and pulled Clark in for the fourth. Clark fucked him in long forceful strokes, a slow withdrawal and then a quick bone-rattling thrust back in. Either this was just how Clark preferred it, which would be a coincidence that defied credulity, or this was for Bruce; this was what he thought Bruce would enjoy. It drove the breath out of Bruce each time, the razor-edged friction and then the hot stab of bliss. He hadn't been coy about what was working for him; more important than that Clark _could_ notice was that he _did_ , that it mattered to him, that he put it into practice at once.

This was Clark. This was the Clark he wanted, the Clark of his regrets and his terrible, longing dreams. The certainty traveled through Bruce in a powerful cathartic shudder. Clark felt it — of course Clark felt it — and he groaned and kissed the shell of Bruce's ear. He fucked Bruce exactly like a combination of unstoppable alien and courteous Midwestern boy would, and each stroke wound Bruce tighter; his orgasm was a final torturous squeeze of pleasure that went on and on and relaxed only fractionally when it was done.

Clark was still fucking him, forcing little eager sounds out of him. He was painfully sensitive now, and it was so good — if Clark just kept at this a while, then maybe— But no, Clark's thrusts had gone short and fast. His thigh clenched so hard in the hand Bruce still gripped it with that Bruce lost purchase, unable to dig his fingers into the muscle any longer. Clark breathed raggedly into the wet folds of cape that covered Bruce's shoulder and fucked him ever quicker and shallower, until at last he yanked both hands from inside Bruce's suit and grabbed for either side of the tank.

Bruce felt the whole progression of Clark's orgasm, from the first jerk of his cock. Apart from that, Clark was so motionless he seemed even to be holding his breath — until Bruce tried to squirm into a position that put more pressure where he wanted it, and Clark gave a little bitten-off cry and thrust into Bruce once, with such violence that liquid slopped from the tank onto the floor. He must have wrenched at the lip of the tank; the glass sang a protestation of its treatment and spiderwebbed with cracks, but didn't quite shatter. Bruce held still after that — he had what he wanted, anyway: the last, inhumanly powerful pulses of Clark's orgasm throbbing themselves out against his prostate — and Clark subsided slowly onto Bruce's back. He was breathing again, long and deep.

That Bruce was not dead was probably the most concrete evidence thus far that Clark was a fully alert participant in this sex act. If he absolutely had to talk to someone about this, ever, it would probably make a better argument than his pre-orgasmic intuitive conviction that this had to be right.

Bruce nudged Clark with an elbow, to no response. He ran his fingers down Clark's arm until he found the hand, drifting in the tank. It was warm but relaxed in Bruce's grip. Clark's breathing was no longer audible, and Bruce and the chemical bath's buoyancy seemed to be taking his full weight.

Terror rose in Bruce's throat, but when he groped for it he found the pulse in Clark's wrist right away. Just unconscious.

Well.

Bruce twisted to press Clark's body up against the side of the tank, where his head wouldn't immediately slip beneath the liquid without Bruce to support him. Clark was still inside Bruce; Bruce pulled himself free with a final shudder of pleasure that he should probably have been glad Clark was not awake to witness, and stood. He was still hard; he felt tense and hungry for more, and jerking the Batsuit back up into place, consigning his erection to the pinching confines of the groin cup, felt like a personal betrayal.

Jesus Christ, he was too old and busy for this. He'd half-forgotten his body acted this way.

He pushed his shoulders back into the suit. Straightening his undersuit was only so possible; he left the top half of it mostly bunched up around his chest and reached behind himself for the pull of the zipper. Fluid from the tank that had flooded into his suit poured back out as the closing zipper drew it snug around Bruce's body again, fountaining over Bruce's hand and down his legs. He yanked and finagled and contorted until the pull was high enough for the catch at the top to engage, then and fished under Clark for his utility belt.

Bruce caught himself looking at Clark as he fumbled at the belt's catch with his slippery fingers, just letting his eye rest on Clark because Clark was there. His head lolled backward over the side of the tank; his mouth was open. The urge to check his pulse again rose up in Bruce, but he could see Clark's chest rise and fall with his breathing, plain as day, through the tatters of his suit. If he stopped sloshing around for a moment he'd probably be able to hear it. Clark was alive.

Holy hell, he was _alive_.

Another urge rose up to replace the last: to get down on his knees again in whatever this liquid was and kiss Clark's sleeping face, kiss him back to wakefulness until he touched Bruce again. Until he looked Bruce in the eye and said — _something_ , anything, Bruce's name, _Hello_ , a condemnation. _Anything_.

Bruce quashed that fantasy as viciously as he knew how, and stepped out of the tank. His feet were heavy — he judged he was carrying fifteen to twenty pounds of extra weight from the liquid in and on his suit. The soles of his boots seemed to grip the linoleum tile of the floor well enough, even through a layer of, by Bruce's reckoning, middling effective lubricant, but he made a point of walking gingerly.

None of his moving about roused Clark. This unconsciousness might become a problem; he might even, at some point, have a legitimate reason to wake Clark, though it would sure as hell not involve kissing him if he did. For now, it gave Bruce time to finish the job he'd come here to do.

Everything was where he'd left it. Bruce collected his equipment and checked in with the security system, then searched for and hit the drain control on the tank. He couldn't be sure it would cover his tracks or even set Rasamala's research back, but it would probably at least annoy someone. 

Without the fluid supporting his weight, Clark slumped gradually to the floor of the tank. Bruce tried to make the front of Clark's suit re-knit itself, then settled for just wrapping him in his sodden cape. 

He was still heavier than he looked, but this time, when Bruce lifted him, his body curled naturally in on itself instead of hanging in Bruce's arms like so much alien laundry. His head rested on Bruce's shoulder.

Bruce took a long, steadying breath, and carried Clark away.

* * *

The fluid from the tank dried sticky. Bruce peeled Clark off the passenger seat of the Batmobile and hauled him into the shower without bothering to undress either of them.

Under the hot pounding spray, he wrestled Clark out of his suit. It would've been impossible without the huge rent Clark had created in the front; Bruce could find no other closures or fastenings. Squeezing Clark's head and shoulders out through the hole was just barely manageable, and from there it was only a matter of skinning the sleeves and legs off Clark's limbs. Bruce rinsed the suit, wrung the water from the cape, and hung it all on the rack he used for his own suit on nights like this, when he came home so covered in something unpleasant that he walked into the shower still fully kitted out.

Bruce divested himself of everything but his undersuit while he was there, then returned to the shower. Clark sat propped on the fold-down bench, with his head resting against the warm tile and his hair plastered to his skull. Maneuvering him was becoming second nature, but his continued unconsciousness raised questions Bruce didn't like. His vitals didn't seem to be declining, but if being sprayed in the face with water didn't wake him, Bruce didn't know what would.

Washing him was a mistake. He was covered in sticky residue; he needed it. But scrubbing under his nails, or pulling him close to soap his back, created an unanticipated illusion of intimacy. Bruce, who had practically made a career of forgetting his own sexual encounters, could not let go of the memory of Clark fucking him, could not stop comparing this physical closeness to that. His body had given up on the prospect of more sex during the drive back from Metropolis, but with Clark's face tucked into the crook of his neck he felt a hopeful stirring, then an idiotic flicker of anger at Clark for satisfying him, but not _enough_.

He shut off the water at once, gave Clark a perfunctory pat dry, and negotiated him into an undershirt and a pair of workout pants. Bruce hauled him to the cot in the cave, and left him to whatever dreams he might be dreaming.

Back in the bathroom, Bruce hosed out his suit, wrung out his undersuit, and left them to dry beside Clark's things. It was just him and his own nude body under the spray of the shower now.

He took stock. Some chafing from wearing the suit home wet and disarranged. A bruise on the jaw that he'd picked up on the way into the LexCorp building, others on his throat and wrist from his brief fight with Clark, more on his hips and ass from what came after. He didn't remember getting those. At the time it hadn't felt like pain.

There was no stopping his cock from throbbing back to life. His libido would jump all over what he had to do next, too. Damn it.

Bruce rested his forehead against the wall and planted his feet far apart. Water poured down his back, just this side of scalding. He touched his asshole gingerly, then slipped in an exploratory finger. The soapy touch stung, but not badly. Mostly just bruising. He'd be titillatingly sore for a while, that was all. His breath went shallow: it was the sensation, but it was the thought, too, of this experience staying on his body for a few days. He was fully hard now. Bruce's free hand flexed against the wall of the shower.

As the local expert in terrible ideas, Bruce knew a bad one when he thought it. Clark might wake at any moment; this was the last thing Bruce needed him seeing.

On the other hand: Clark might wake at any moment, and Bruce needed to be calm and reasonable when he did, not pant after him like sex with Clark was something he ought to expect and not a bizarre accident that had happened once.

He slid a second finger into himself. It was pointless trying to be quiet: either Clark was asleep and there was no need to prevent him from hearing this, or he was awake and there was no _way_ to prevent him from hearing this. Bruce bit hard at his own lip anyway, and arched into the shower wall as he pushed his fingers deeper. He had the luxury of edging up slowly on his prostate instead of just battering an orgasm out of it the way Clark had; he stroked it and the pleasure reignited in flickers, in prickles across his skin.

There was no recapturing what Clark had done to him. Not just the very specific sensation of being fucked quickly and roughly with minimal preparation, or the smooth blunt shape of Clark inside him that Bruce's fingers could not match, but the total experience of Clark. He'd been appallingly like the Clark of Bruce's fantasies, the ones that had started as nightmares and then crept out of his sleeping mind and into his waking life: an overwhelming force of unclear agenda that wanted Bruce to come.

Bruce ran his free hand down the wall of the shower and up his thigh and, finally, along his cock. He was sore there too, from the confining cup and the chafing on the drive back to the cave; he dragged his thumb unkindly over the places where he was tenderest and his cock jerked in his hand. 

He had all the pieces of a perfectly good sexual fantasy right here. The object of his lust asleep in the next room, where he could easily wake and wander in; a thorough personal knowledge of what that object of lust sounded like, how his mouth and hands and body felt. But as Bruce's breath shortened and his hand moved faster and his fingers curled tighter, the images fragmented, and what he sought to recreate in his mind was not the fine personal details of sex with Clark but the violence, the uncertainty of his own fate. He imagined the stone tile of the wall cracking; he imagined being lifted from his feet. He imagined the red light of Clark's deadly eyes. He caught himself rising onto his toes, pressing his forehead against the shower wall hard enough that there would be a mark.

This orgasm was a long hollowing release, like being pushed, finally, from the precipice that Clark had brought him up to earlier and left him dangling from. It wrung the snarling tension from his muscles; it blackened his vision. It crumpled his body and sent him to his knees. He unwound from it slowly, dazed. His first attempt to stand failed.

Good. Perfect. He'd be able to focus now. Bruce sat under the pummeling water until he was sure he could walk, then shut it off and got out.

* * *

Nefarious science generally came in two kinds: back-shed, after-hours operations in which a visionary with a horrible breakthrough toiled largely alone to bring about their distorted idea of justice; and corporate operations, which might have hundreds of accomplices to a single mastermind, all of whom were happy to punch a clock in one room while an atrocity transpired in the next, but still never saw more than five percent of the project apiece. The major difference was accountability. The first type rarely kept notes; when they did, the tone was grandiose and expository. The latter nearly always did, but terse, granular ones, meant for the eyes of their supervisor or the person on the next shift.

What corporate nefarious science like LexCorp's had going for it was the public relations department and, as Bruce knew well, dim executives who needed things explained to them in small words. The internal notes of the lab grunts wouldn't give him the big picture of what was happening at that facility, but after digging a while he found an enticingly-named PowerPoint presentation attached to an email.

It led with a gormless visual summary of last year's graphic design trends and a mockup of a space shuttle. Bruce scrolled past the opening pap. 

_Project Lazarus represents a thrilling new direction for LexCorp Aerospace and a rebirth for the flagging American space program...._

_... self-renewing atmospheric entry shielding technology ... most cost-effective space flight in history...._

_... all-new flexible polymer—_

LexCorp was making pitches to NASA and trying to get tissue samples off Superman's corpse at the same facility. There were a few obvious ways these things could connect with each other and Bruce didn't like any of them.

Clark stirred in his sleep.

All of Bruce's thoughts slammed to a halt. His heart leapt into his throat; he was on his feet at once.

Clark had rolled a little onto his side and brought his half-curled fist up to rest on the pillow beside his face. His hair was beginning to curl as it dried.

Looking at him assailed Bruce with the memory of how warm he'd been. Surely he'd be a match even for the perpetual damp chill of the cave. There was nothing, not even Clark himself, stopping Bruce from going to the cot, nuzzling his face into the hollow of Clark's throat, and stealing some of that heat for himself.

No and no.

Clark just lay there. That was all.

This was a good sign. If Clark was moving on his own, he had probably progressed from unconsciousness to normal sleep, and he would wake soon enough on his own. Bruce's intervention wouldn't be required. And there was nothing to be gained by taking his pulse, or brushing his hair back from his face and watching his eyes for the signs of REM sleep, or in any way moving to Clark's side and touching him one more time, now, before he woke and the prospect evaporated forever.

Bruce sat again, slowly. He had work to be doing. 

Exploring the site lead's inbox quickly revealed that all was not right at Dr. Rasamala's lab. The site had research and production facilities, a helicopter and someone to fly it, a team of people able and equipped to steal Superman's suit from the Smithsonian, and _free parking_ ; but their communication with LexCorp's central nervous system was a perfunctory trickle. LexCorp seemed to think this was a low-security storage facility, with a much smaller roster than it possessed.

It wasn't the first orphaned site Bruce had encountered since LexCorp's violent restructuring after Luthor's arrest, but it was the first one with real aspirations. This one had been stealing materials and research for months, and it was furiously reverse-engineering this Project Lazarus. For which it had required Superman's dead body.

Clark made a noise when he stirred this time, a little sigh. He put his face into the pillow, then must have thought better of it — Bruce imagined it was still damp from Clark's hair — and rolled onto his back. So he wasn't just moving of his own volition, but responding to stimulus.

He would feel it if Bruce touched him. Maybe he would curl into Bruce's body, if Bruce were with him on the cot.

Bruce seriously considered shaking Clark awake just to preserve his own sanity.

Or waking him some other way. He'd taken well enough to Bruce's advances in the lab. If Bruce climbed in beside Clark right now and kissed his way down Clark's body, if what Clark woke to was Bruce sucking him to hardness, would he roll with it again? Maybe the way to short-circuit what promised to be an absolutely fucking unbearable conversation when Clark woke was to keep Clark too busy for conversation. Bruce was _good_ at using sex to circumvent discussion.

He rubbed his face and groaned. He would for damn sure accomplish nothing positive for his future interactions with Clark with this line of speculation, and he couldn't afford to be distracted right now anyway.

At least the reading wasn't boring: like most megalomaniacs, the site lead was energetic and full of ideas. Bruce sifted details out of a huge volume of email. Quite a lot of cranky commentary about the difficulties of stealing data and samples from the high-security underwater research base that housed most of Project Lazarus proper; the site lead's plans — this was where things got grandiose — to secede from and then outcompete LexCorp with their superior version of the Project Lazarus product; open speculation about the nature and origins of "the Lazarus medium", the green substance, which LexCorp was trying to monetize without apparently knowing what it was, where it was from, or how to manufacture more; and eventually, a frank discussion of why this splinter project had needed Clark's body.

Project Lazarus' breakthrough space shuttle shielding was not an exotic new polymer, but cultured Kryptonian skin cells. The site Bruce had broken into couldn't get their own project off the ground without a tissue culture, but the original, "legitimate" Project Lazarus, ensconced safely on the sea floor, controlled all the samples Lex Luthor had taken from Zod.

—and Bruce did have a legitimate reason to hope that whatever transpired after Clark woke ended on a positive note. If he wanted to keep being Superman, if he was still willing to give that to a world that had tried to kill him at least three different ways in the same night, the League would be an obvious place for him.

There had always been a place for Superman in the League. When his return to life was not even the dimmest, most distant possibility, he had still been the Elijah they all set an extra place for at the table. It was his shoes they were trying to fill.

They had done all right. No, that wasn't fair: Bruce was proud of every one of them for what they had accomplished together. But none of them was Superman.

 _Clark_ was Superman, and he was grumbling to himself in his sleep on the cot in Bruce's headquarters, wearing Bruce's clothes. And when he woke, Bruce would have to justify the choices he had made about Clark — in the last couple of hours, and maybe in the time since his death. Maybe all of them, ever. He was more than due a reckoning.

Jesus, what was Bruce doing? Research, right. He threw a stack of memos onto the large monitor. He should at least appear busy, when—

"Mmph," Clark said. "Uh?" The cot creaked under him.

Bruce whirled his chair about to face Clark. He was rubbing his eyes, his furrowed brow; when Bruce moved, he lunged up onto his elbows, but his gaze skipped Bruce altogether in favor of ricocheting bewilderedly around the cave. It didn't fix on Bruce until he rose from his seat and took a step toward the cot.

The recognition in Clark's expression was clear and immediate. So, at least his mind was intact. As he crossed the space between workstation and cot, Bruce watched Clark's brows furrow again, then shoot upward. His mouth opened, trembled, closed. Several stages of confusion chased each other across his expression. He looked at his own hands in puzzlement; he touched his lips. With a gasp, he tore open the front of the T-shirt Bruce had put on him, and ran his fingers along the curve of bare skin where his chest hair hadn't grown in yet over the seam of his healed wound.

With one hand still over his heart and the other full of shredded cotton, he looked back up at Bruce as though to share his astonishment. Bruce was just turning a nearby chair around to face the cot; as he sat in it, Clark's gaze scanned down Bruce's body, and his face fell.

Shit.

The first words Clark said were, "I hurt you. Oh, God, I'm so sorry."

Bruce's pulse jumped; at the same moment, he had to master the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. He took a deep breath instead, and let it out slowly. His heart rate fell back toward normal. He unclenched everything he'd started clenching.

"I'm fine," he said. "Don't worry about it. How do — are you in any discomfort."

"You don't seem fine," Clark began, "you seem _terrified_ —"

He stopped when Bruce held up his hands.

"I had misgivings about this conversation," said Bruce, "because I thought you might fixate on an issue other than your own health, which is my paramount concern right now." It wasn't even a lie.

Clark gave him a hard look, but didn't pursue it. He took stock of the cave again, more slowly this time. Some of the places his attention rested didn't make immediate sense; Bruce drew lines of sight to other chambers of his mental model of the cave, straight through rock and metal. He wouldn't have many secrets left if Clark stayed here long.

"I feel okay," Clark said at last. "I think there's a gap in my memory."

"What makes you say that?"

"I don't understand why—" He went scarlet all at once. "I'm sorry, I don't understand why we were having sex, or what we were doing in — what was that building? Are you and I—"

"We are not," Bruce said, too quickly. Clark didn't seem to take it like a rebuff, and why would he. His eyes drifted off Bruce again, focusing inward.

"I was dead," he said slowly. "I remember dying."

"You did."

"I think I've lost just about everything after that. How am I alive?"

"Do you remember being in a tank?" When Clark nodded, Bruce said, "The liquid in it brought you back. I don't know how, yet."

Clark's brow beetled. "And we went _back_ to the tank later — to have—"

"There was no gap between the two things," Bruce said. He gave in and rubbed his face with both hands. This conversation was only going to get worse. "You came back either disoriented or angry, and things got violent," he said, at last. "I tried to distract you and — in the moment, you seemed interested in sex, so that's where I redirected your — energy."

This was not coming out as well as Bruce had hoped it would. It sounded disastrous to his ears, and it must have sounded even worse to Clark's, because he'd covered his mouth with one hand and was listening to Bruce with wet-eyed horror. When Bruce stopped trying to assemble sentences about the subject, Clark pressed his fingers briefly to his eyes and said, in a quaking voice, "So you had sex with me because I would have hurt you if you hadn't?"

Bruce's stomach dropped. "That's an uncharitable—"

"And then I hurt you anyway, _while_ we were having the sex that was supposed to stop me from hurting you?"

"I'm _fine_ ," Bruce said again. "It's not a problem. The sex was my idea—"

"Bruce, I am so sorry." A breath caught in Clark's chest. "I would never ordinarily—" He stopped himself before the thought was all the way out, but Bruce jumped on it like it was a lifeline.

"Exactly. I made advances on you when you were barely conscious. Nothing that happened is your responsibility."

Clark wasn't having it. "Would it be better if I left?"

No. Yes. More yes than no, which Bruce could not have envisioned five minutes ago. He pressed his hands against his face again. "That might be best," he said, and Clark nodded resolutely. "It wasn't clear if or when you'd wake up, so I haven't contacted anyone. No one in your life knows you're alive."

" _Ma_ ," Clark said, bolting to his feet. He searched the ceiling; Bruce imagined he would have rocketed out of the cave at once if there had been an obvious exit, and couldn't blame him for the impulse.

"She's fine," Bruce said offhandedly. Clark's chin jerked back down, and he looked at Bruce in surprise. "Yes, I've kept tabs," Bruce went on. "I don't save someone's life and then just leave them to their fate."

Clark opened his mouth, then hesitated; he looked at Bruce like he wasn't sure if it was permitted to talk to him. For Christ's sake. "I ... never thanked you for that."

"No need." Maybe if Bruce was persistently breezy and indifferent with Clark, this would all blow over and Clark would start treating him like — what? A colleague? It might not be what he wanted, but it was certainly better than he'd earned. "It's been about eighteen months," he said. "The addresses and phone numbers of most of the people you know are the same, but Clark Kent is legally dead and Superman is understood to be dead by the general public."

"Huh." The logistical ramifications of Clark's resurrection played out across his expression.

"There are solutions for this, if you want to re-enter public life. But you should probably touch base with your family first."

"Right, sorry. Thank you, you've been more helpful than— Thank you for looking out for my mom." A note of desperation entered Clark's voice. "What's the best way out?"

"Up the stairs, out the front door. Ignore the machinery. You don't have to pass the biometrics to exit the cave." Bruce got to his feet, and Clark immediately backed out of Bruce's personal bubble. They were dressed essentially the same way; it was just what Bruce put on after a shower, when he didn't immediately need to be anywhere. When they were both barefoot, Clark was still a couple of inches shorter than Bruce. How had Bruce never noticed? "Don't fly off yet," he said, and walked past Clark, back to his workstation. They were never less than three feet apart, but Clark still backed away again.

"Okay," Clark said warily, and watched Bruce retrieve one of his spare phones from the desk drawer. Bruce hid the functionality he'd rather not have Clark getting into with a few taps of his thumb, then tossed the phone to him; Clark caught it smoothly out of the air. It was like throwing something to Barry: reflexes so fast he might as well have been taking a stationary object off a shelf. "What ..." he began.

"I'd like a more efficient way to contact you than calling your mother and asking if you're home."

"Okay, yeah." Clark pocketed the phone.

"Spend as long as you want catching up. I'll be in touch when I have something you should know. LexCorp hasn't gotten any better at covering their tracks, so it should be soon." 

"LexCorp," Clark echoed. "That was a _LexCorp_ building?"

Oh. "This would have come out sooner if you hadn't immediately fixated on a few bruises, exactly like I said you shouldn't."

Watching Clark struggle not to be irritated by this might have been worth the entire clusterfuck of this night. His brow furrowed and unfurrowed; a quirk traveled from one side of his mouth to the other. He took a deep breath. "Would it be more helpful if I stayed here and — I don't know—"

"No. Go see your mother."

"Thank you," Clark said feelingly.

Bruce had told Clark himself how to get out of the cave, had even wished him gone to escape the agony of this conversation, but it wasn't until Clark made for the stairs that the reality of him _leaving_ struck home. They'd speak again, probably soon, but for all Bruce knew, this could be the last time they were alone in a room together. Clark could hardly be blamed for avoiding that.

"I'll show you out," Bruce said, like an idiot, and followed Clark up the stairs.

Clark couldn't seem to decide whether to forge on ahead or fall back and let Bruce precede him; Bruce passed him at a bend in the staircase, half to take mercy on him and half to get the door at the top for him. He ushered Clark into the lake house's bathroom, then out into the house proper.

The sun was rising over the lake, hurling its golden spears blindly through the mist. It was Bruce's least favorite part of the day, the hour when the light stabbed directly into his eyes if he had the fortune to be in bed at all. Clark gasped when the rays struck him, and stared into the sun like it was the face of a beloved person he couldn't believe he had forgotten. His hand went to his chest: down in Bruce's chthonic sanctum he had forgotten he was wearing a shirt he'd torn open over his heart, but up here on the surface of the Earth he was self-conscious enough to press the tear uselessly closed with his fingers.

He made a vague sideways motion, toward the back door of the house; Bruce obligingly went to it and held it open for Clark, while Clark trailed behind him, still transfixed. He didn't blink until he stepped through the door onto the dock, and the light bathed him with no intervening glass; then he closed his eyes and tipped his face up into it as though it were a warm rain. The sun drew him forward until his bare toes curled over the edge of the dock and the mist rose around his ankles — and Bruce followed him, every bit as enthralled. He'd been right to come upstairs.

"I didn't think about you needing to recharge," he said, coming level with Clark at the edge of the dock, and looked at Clark's gilded profile.

"It's okay," Clark breathed. "It's like that first bite of food when you hadn't realized you were hungry." He opened his eyes and looked at Bruce. The sun drew the shadow of each eyelash individually across his irises. "God," he said, "I haven't flown yet."

It had not occurred to Bruce that flight would be something other than a mode of transportation for Clark — that in this way, through this consequence of his alien biology, merely existing might be pleasurable for Clark. The question rose up in Bruce now, but died on his tongue as Clark pivoted on the ball of his foot and fell into the sky like a man returning to the arms of a lover.

Bruce swallowed hard. He watched Clark's reflection in the lake, as though looking away from the man himself would quell the desire to drag him back down to Earth. Down below, he'd had this under control, but watching Clark exult in a sunrise was too much. He'd barely gotten to touch Clark, during Clark's brief spell of consciousness in the LexCorp building. They'd kissed almost continuously until Clark had turned him around, and Bruce was realizing now that that wasn't actually enough, either.

He expected Clark to simply take off, but after a brief spiraling ascent and some long loops just above the surface of the water he was back, floating a few feet out from the end of the dock. Bruce met his eye again, with difficulty. The sun outlined Clark with fire.

"The stuff in the tank brought me back?"

"Right. I'm analyzing a sample of it now."

"Who put me in the tank?"

This felt like a trap. "Me," Bruce said reluctantly.

"Then — thank you. God, thank you. You gave me so much back and I never stopped to find out you were the one who did it."

Bruce cleared his throat. "Go see your mother."

"Yeah," Clark said. He looked at Bruce for another moment, as though there were something he wanted to say, or ask; but he floated away again without another word, up into the pink of the morning sky. When he was a couple of hundred feet up, he reoriented west. Down on the dock, Bruce heard the _crack_ of the sound barrier shattering.

He watched until even Clark's vapor trail faded; then he descended back into the cave. The mass spectrometer had spat out several sheets about the tank materials he'd given it. He sat at his workstation without bothering to retrieve them and stared blankly at his unfinished research.

Bruce's eye strayed toward the clock at the bottom of the screen. It would be evening in Paris.

Diana picked up on the third ring.

"There's been a development in the Superman situation," he said to her.


	2. Chapter 2

Sun over the lake was an inescapable reminder of Clark now. This was not that dawn moment in which he had reacquainted himself with the sky, but Bruce was nevertheless breathtakingly aware that Clark had been here, in what passed for his home, just four days ago. There was no mist at this hour, but the sun was low enough still to draw a glittering path across the surface of the water, like an otherworldly runway.

"How much did Alfred cook?" said Diana, staring into the refrigerator.

"Neither of us knows how much a Kryptonian eats," Bruce said, opening the oven. Warm air touched his face. "He'd die before underfeeding a guest." He pulled on an oven mitt.

"There's _more_?"

"If you would just get those two bowls," Bruce said.

Alfred had left two covered pans of french toast, one of sausage and bacon, and a tureen of eggs in the oven to keep warm. Surely, if Clark had Barry-like dietary requirements, he also had the ability to limit himself to a reasonable amount of food when eating with other people; he'd never have maintained his cover while he traveled the world, otherwise. But the argument hadn't held water with Alfred, and Bruce wasn't about to take someone else's side against him.

Diana, in the midst of popping the lid off an enormous bowl of fruit compote, raised her head and focused her gaze out a westward window. That speck in the sky could have been anything — but if she was looking at it like this, it was Clark. Bruce still didn't know how she did it, exactly.

Clark was far enough out that Bruce had time to finish the setting the table and get the door for him. His aerial approach had been from the front of the house, but he passed straight over as though there were neighbors who might notice if he landed on the front lawn; Bruce zagged to the back door and reached it just as Clark touched down on the dock.

He'd dressed like he was going to work: jeans, muted plaid, tie, corduroy sport coat. The glasses. His hair was curlier than he'd ever allowed it to be in news footage. The effect was more formal than either Bruce or Diana, less like something he had just thrown on, but also less expensive. Bruce didn't recognize the bundle in Clark's hands until he'd come nearly up to the door: the T-shirt and workout pants Bruce had put him in. Bruce hadn't thought of it in terms of Clark _borrowing_ them, but of course he would return them. Probably laundered.

"Hi," he said as he came up the stairs. "I didn't realize this was going to be.... Hi," he said again, as Diana came up behind Bruce.

"I've been bringing Diana up to speed on ..." Bruce began, but trailed off when Diana walked past him. She met Clark on the threshold and pulled him at once into a hug.

"Welcome back to the world," she said.

Clark pulled back enough to fix her with a disbelieving look, but the tension quickly began to drain from his shoulders, and his dimples appeared. "You're the first person who's said that." He returned her hug one-armed, and let her lead him into the house.

"What has everyone else said?" asked Diana, taking the bundle of Bruce's workout clothes from him. Bruce closed the door behind them, so his hands were free a moment later when she passed the clothes to him.

"A lot of 'Oh my God, how?'," said Clark, and Diana laughed. "If there's any truth to the reporting on you, and if there was any truth to my classics courses, you might be the only person equipped to react gracefully to a situation like this."

While they talked, Bruce took the clothes to the bedroom and deposited them on the bed. He ran his hand over the shirt: the tear had been mended with tiny, exquisitely precise herringbone stitches. Bruce had no reason to salvage, or even think twice about, a ruined shirt, but the repairs to this one would probably last longer than the rest of the garment.

"Oh, you'd be surprised," Diana said, from the other side of the house. Conversation was audible from every part of the building — it was tiny, a glorified tent Bruce's family had camped in on the odd weekend when he was small. "So, you've been catching up."

"Yeah. I'm sorry, I don't know how you feel about people checking up on you in the press."

"Do you mind that I've seen news coverage of you?"

"I'd be jealous if you had figured out how to avoid it."

"Exactly. Come sit."

Clark was still on his feet when Bruce returned; he was pointing at the spread on the kitchen table, the heaping platters, the ocean of whipped cream. When Bruce rounded the corner into the kitchen, Clark looked up at him and said, "How much do you think I eat?"

Diana put her hands to her face and began to laugh again.

"I have no idea," Bruce said resolutely, pulling out a chair for himself. "Alfred was determined not to run out of food. He's had some trouble keeping up with Barry."

"Alfred?"

"You've heard his voice over my earpiece." As far back as the library benefit where they'd first met, as Bruce had realized in retrospect. At the time he'd had no notion the self-righteous Metropolis reporter was Superman, but a lot of things had become clear to him when he'd retrod them later in his mind. He still wasn't sure whether Clark had known then that he was goading the Bat, or if that had come later.

"The British guy you don't deserve?" asked Clark. Bruce couldn't place the reference, but it sounded like Alfred; he nodded. "He's not eating with us?"

"Alfred is Wayne Enterprises' head of security and, unlike me, has job duties other than glad-handing and delivering speeches written by other people."

"Well — I hope you'll thank him for me. This all looks delicious." Clark sat, and Bruce put food on a plate for him just to prevent a stalemate about who got to serve themself first. "Um ... Barry?" said Clark, watching Bruce's hands.

"The Flash."

"Right. When I ... was here before, I didn't realize there was a whole team now. A whole League?"

"We didn't talk for long," Bruce said.

"I guess not."

A leaden silence descended. Diana moved into it gracefully.

"Do you think you'll be joining us?"

"I hadn't thought about it," Clark said, and then, "Thanks," as Bruce finished loading his plate. "You seem to be doing fine. I don't know what another really strong person would add to the mix."

Surprise silenced Bruce. He'd rehearsed a dozen reasons Clark might reject the offer of a place in the League, but never once considered that Clark might look at the thing Bruce had built in his memory, in a desperate bid to live up to what he'd done for humankind, and think he was _extraneous_.

"Was that you at the Amtrak accident on Saturday?" said Diana, as she served herself. Clark had just cut into his french toast; he jumped like he'd been caught doing something untoward.

"Yeah," he said huntedly. "I was out flying and I heard— I was in the right place at the right time." Bruce was fairly sure that in this context, _out flying_ was code for _at the far edge of Earth's atmosphere_.

" _That's_ what you would add, Kal-El," Diana said, pointing her loaded fork. Clark started when he heard his alien name, then smiled at her with slow-dawning wonder. Bruce wondered if he'd been called that name by an Earthling before. "A century ago, the world dealt me a great hurt. It took me a long time to be ready again to answer when it called me for help. It took you two days. You would have something to add to the League even if you weren't a 'really strong guy', and it would be my honor to fight at your side again."

She drew Clark in as easily as she did a mere mortal. Bruce had wondered if it would work on Clark, who held a certain otherworldly fascination himself — but Clark actually leaned toward her as she spoke, with his temporarily forgotten fork still buried in his food. Diana was an unparallelled pitchman, too. Bruce couldn't imagine Clark being riveted this way by an argument about how no one else in the League, not even Victor, could surpass his search and surveillance capabilities.

By the time she finished, Clark had gone red. The full force of Diana's esteem could be a lot to take. He sat back, and put a bite of food in his mouth finally. To give himself a moment, Bruce thought. "Thank you," he said once he'd swallowed, "really, thank you — but I meant it when I said it was a right place, right time thing."

"Maybe," Diana said. "It was also you."

"You don't lose a lot of arguments, do you."

"Only when I'm wrong." She bit into a strawberry with satisfaction.

Clark chuckled. Bruce had never heard him laugh before, not even this little sound; he'd never been remotely amused in Bruce's presence prior to this morning.

Asking Diana to be here had been wise. At least Bruce got to hear that.

"I was expecting this conversation to run much more along the lines of _We don't want you doing that without League sanction_ ," Clark said, spearing a link of sausage with his fork. "Or _If you have to do it, at least don't use a scarf for a mask_."

Bruce found himself talking, and could not have sworn it wasn't just to have the relaxed, companionable gaze Clark had fixed Diana with directed at him for a moment. "The League exists to coordinate and organize us against threats just one of us can't handle. Not to curtail the activity of benign metahumans — not in general, and especially not you."

Clark stared at Bruce for what felt like some time with his fork halfway to his mouth. Bruce may have succeeded too well. "You're ... different," Clark said.

"The scarf was awful," Bruce said, startling another laugh out of Diana and Clark both. "You looked like you'd decided in the last five minutes to trade up from liquor store theft to train robbery, and the top half of your face is —" 

Clark had put the back of his hand to his mouth to cover it when he laughed the second time; he was still grinning over it at Bruce. His smile was a whole-face event, and the glasses did not reduce its force.

"— distinctive," Bruce concluded weakly. "The conspiracy boards are already comparing the footage to images of Superman. Just take your suit back."

"Was this the plan for today? Feed him a pile of food and give him the hard sell?"

"I didn't expect Diana to launch into this so soon," Bruce muttered, and Diana laughed again. "The point remains," he went on. "If you decide to retire, the League will still repair your civilian identity and provide any other assistance you need. If you don't, there's a place for you with us."

Bruce could hear the exact moment he laid it on too thick. He thought that Diana might, horribly, have given a little gasp, and when he glanced at her he found that she'd sat up straighter in her chair. Delight illuminated her features. Bruce had had enough epiphanies himself to know one when he saw it. Fuck. There was no way to control this without turning it into a conversation he absolutely did not want to have with Clark present.

He tried shooting her a quelling look; surely even if the situation were as she thought, she would respect Bruce's preference for discretion in his personal dealings. She was looking at Clark for his reaction to this, like a tennis spectator, and didn't seem to have noticed Bruce's expression. Should've kicked her under the table.

So much had happened in the last three seconds that Bruce couldn't guess why exactly Clark looked so taken aback. "It's a lot to consider—"

"Of course," Bruce said at once, and hustled Clark away from the subject as quickly as he could. Diana had put her chin in one hand and was watching them talk with entirely too much pleasure. "However, one of the reasons I requested your presence here today was to ask you to make a formal public appearance as Superman. If that's out of the question, which is a separate issue from your involvement or lack thereof with the League, it would be good to establish that now so I can—"

"Okay, wait," Clark said, holding up both hands. "What? Why, to announce I'm alive?"

"That would be a side effect, but no. A press conference with the weight of your and Diana's voices behind it might be able to curtail LexCorp's activity at the facility where I found your body."

"Okay," Clark said again, rubbing his forehead. "Back up. I still don't really have any idea what happened at the LexCorp building. You brought me there—"

"Your corpse was already there. LexCorp took it from your grave."

Clark's breath hissed in through his teeth. "Maybe I should shut up and let you explain," he said.

"LexCorp Aerospace wants to monetize Kryptonian tissue. A rogue division stole your body to develop a new line of cultures from it — without success; you apparently don't shed cells and were still invulnerable while you were dead. LexCorp proper seems to be close to going public with a space shuttle tiled in material grown from samples of General Zod's skin that were already in their possession."

For an instant, Clark was incandescent with fury. The expression was so familiar it might have been comforting, if it hadn't also been one of the most perilous sights on Earth. Clark's jaw clenched; he looked down at his plate. He put his fork down for a moment, with no more or less delicacy than any human might have, then picked it up again immediately and stuffed his mouth with food. 

Bruce's hand curled against the tabletop next to his own plate. His heart raced and he had no hope of slowing it. Clark seemed to be paying him no mind, thank God; he stared out the window and over the lake as he chewed.

Diana broke the silence. "Is that a yes?"

Clark swallowed once, then again. "What do you need from me?"

"Are you available on Wednesday at eight AM Eastern?" said Bruce.

"Well," Clark said tensely, then made an effort to smile. "I have no job and everyone thinks I'm dead. I can probably pencil you in." Delivering this weak joke seemed to drain off the rest of his anger. He wet his lips, pushed his food around his plate a little, and glanced sidelong at Bruce. "Sorry."

Not for the joke, Bruce realized after a moment, but for the moments preceding it. Bruce had no idea how to react to this, so he ignored it. No one had ever turned Bruce on and then apologized for it before.

"I'll alert the press to be in Heroes Park in Metropolis at nine. I've prepared a statement, which you can edit however you like. Or throw it out, if you prefer."

"Something to build on would be good. Thanks. You're on board with this?" said Clark, to Diana.

"Of course," Diana said, dredging the last of her bacon through the syrup and berries on her plate. "This affects all of us. Now that we're agreed, and I've eaten my fill of Alfred's wonderful cooking, I should be going."

Shit. This wasn't the plan. Time alone together was precisely the last thing either Bruce or Clark needed.

"Shouldn't you —" Bruce began.

"Already taken care of," Diana said, rising. "Please give Alfred my love."

"Diana —" he tried. She kissed him on the cheek.

"No," she said brightly. "I'll see you on Wednesday."

Clark rose when Diana approached his chair, and they stepped into another hug like it was a dance move they'd rehearsed. He beamed at her as she pulled back, though he seemed baffled by her quick exit. Good; maybe he wouldn't realize she was leaving because she thought Bruce wanted to get him alone and rip his clothes off. That was accurate but immaterial.

But accurate. Bruce pictured, for one moment, his own thumbs hooking into the front of Clark's shirt, the buttons popping off — and, God, Clark's retaliation; what he could _do_ to a suit. Then Bruce shut that thought down, as hard as he knew how. This was precisely the worst time, with Diana about to leave and work to do.

Clark was saying to Diana, a little warily, "You do regular clothes. Do you do phones?"

She laughed, but it was gentle. Her hands were still on Clark's shoulders; he seemed not to know what to do with his own hands, but he didn't step back from her. They had a physical rapport already that Bruce couldn't conceive of well enough to envy. If he asked Diana about it, she'd just say something incomprehensible about knowing each other through battle.

"I'm Diana Prince," she said. "I'm an art restorer for the Louvre, and I do have a phone."

"Clark Kent. I used to be a reporter." A bitter note lurked in Clark's voice, but there was only wonder in his smile. Diana had produced her phone, so Clark rattled off the number of the phone Bruce had given him, then checked it when it buzzed in his pocket.

"There," Diana said, when they'd completed this ritual. "I'll see you both on Wednesday." She'd come by car; she walked out Bruce's front door like any mortal.

Clark sat again, slowly, as he watched her pull away, and finally glanced down at his plate. He hadn't emptied it yet: he hadn't been chowing down like a theatergoer on their popcorn, unlike some other superhumans at the table. "Would you prefer I left too?" he said.

"No," Bruce said. "I have two other matters for your attention."

"Okay." Clark paused. "Okay," he said again, "but if I'm not leaving, I'd like to ask you some questions before we talk about anything else."

Bruce clenched and unclenched his jaw. "Ask." It was probably too late for a desperate text to Diana.

Clark surveyed the table. Bruce's plate was untouched, and Diana and Clark between them had hardly made a dent in the food. He reloaded his plate, probably to buy himself time; his eyes flickered up to Bruce and then down. Bruce used the time to search desperately inside himself for any sort of peace or center he might still have somewhere; there was a long list of things he owed Clark answers to, and if Clark wanted to grill him, that was Clark's right.

"Friday morning, when I woke up," Clark said at last, pushing food around his crowded plate, "you were pretty emphatic that you were comfortable with what happened. Is that still true?"

"Why would it change?"

"You've had time to think about it. Is it still true?"

"Yes," Bruce said, only slightly through his teeth.

Clark looked at Bruce for too long with his clear, penetrating eyes. "Okay," he said. "Can you give me a rough timeline of what happened in that building? You said LexCorp stole my body, and then...."

Bruce almost relaxed. If this was all Clark wanted, he could have it. "I had reason to think that theft of your corpse might be an issue, so I planted a transponder on it before interment. It showed movement early Thursday, around two AM, and came to rest in the building where I found it — you — by five AM, suggesting it was transported by helicopter. I went in to recover your body that night. One of the researchers' notes speculated that immersing you in the liquid in the tank in the room where I found you would ... restore you to life."

"So you just—" Clark offered some grimly comic insight into how he imagined his resurrection by gesturing as though to toss a sack of flour onto the floor. This was the part of the story Alfred and Diana had struggled with too.

"It was a rare opportunity," Bruce said, and, when Clark just frowned at him, "and it was unlikely to work. I had nothing to lose but my dignity."

"How close did I come to killing you?"

Bruce stopped himself from reaching up to touch his throat. The bruises there hadn't healed yet; none of them had. He'd put some concealer on them because he had a meeting later, but it seemed unlikely Clark wasn't already more than aware of them. "Closer than the previous time we fought. Your intent seemed specifically lethal."

"Okay," Clark said tightly. "How did that turn into sex?"

"I kissed you. I was pinned and thought it might distract you enough to create an opening for me to escape or negotiate."

"Okay," Clark said again, and rubbed his mouth. It would've been a perfectly innocuous mannerism in any other context; maybe he just did that, and Bruce was wrong to imagine Clark remembering their furious, grappling kisses.

"You fell unconscious after your orgasm," Bruce said, to get himself back on track. Clark flinched. "I was able to remove you from the building without further incident. You can guess the rest."

"Did I say anything? Did I threaten you?"

"Why the Hell would you need to threaten me?"

Clark's shrug was so elaborately sarcastic his entire upper body got in on it. "I did a lot of other things that night that I can't exactly reconcile."

"No, you didn't say anything," Bruce said. "Because you weren't lucid. You weren't in control of your actions. I doubt you even realized it was me. You were in no shape for conversation. At the time your behavior seemed coherent and voluntary, but in retrospect I'm surprised that, when you woke up, you—"

Clark had gone pale. "What made you think that?"

Bruce grimaced. He needed to stop volunteering information. "You were more courteous than I thought instinct would account for. Probably just a Midwestern brainstem reflex."

"Courteous!" Clark encompassed Bruce's body with a gesture that made it very clear he had a full-length view of Bruce through the wood tabletop. "You're still _covered_ in bruises."

"I'm sure you assumed your sexual partner was as durable as you are—"

"Boy, you're just tying this excuse up in a bow for me, aren't you?"

"Not being fully conscious isn't an 'excuse', Clark. Just look at the facts—"

Clark slapped the tabletop with enough force to make the dishes jump and the silverware rattle. "I knew it was you, Bruce! Not that it would be any better, _at all_ , if I hadn't."

Bruce held himself very still in his seat, while his heart hammered against his ribs. "How much do you remember?"

"I don't know," Clark snapped. He pushed his fingers through his hair, sending it wild. "I know I convinced myself that if it was happening at all it must be normal, somehow, between us. I convinced myself you liked it. Which is the worst thing I've ever had to say about myself, but here we are and I guess you were right about me the first time, Bruce, because —"

"I did," Bruce said.

"— it felt good and I didn't want to stop, so I told myself the story that would make that acceptable, which was that you didn't want me to stop eith—"

" _I didn't_ ," Bruce said, at several times the volume. Clark cut off in the middle of the next vowel. "I was furious you _did_ stop. Do you understand how _completely_ you have misread this situation? You didn't have to convince yourself of a goddamn thing. You did everything right, you read me like a fucking book, and I was _desperate_ for more up until the moment you fell asleep on top of me like a teenager. All right? Does this conclude the tour of Clark Kent's self-recriminations? _You_ may be an unemployed ghost, but _I_ have things to accomplish today." Bruce lunged upright out of his chair.

Clark's mouth closed slowly. He did not particularly look like a man from whom a great weight had been lifted. "You could have said something."

Bruce hadn't realized he was breathing hard. "You've been resistant to my perspective on the subject."

"Because the perspective you were giving me was 'It wasn't your fault', not—" Clark went red, all at once. "Not 'It was good for me too'."

"It'll save us both a lot of time in the future if you say up front when you're fishing for praise." Bruce's phone vibrated in his pocket; he slapped it to quiet it.

Clark recoiled; for an instant his expression was completely unguarded, and Bruce could see clearly that that one had hurt. Then Clark's eyebrows came down, and he compressed his mouth into a grimace. "If you're trying to stop me from pressing you for a repeat performance, I can promise you that's not why I came here. Can we please—" His face changed again, just as quickly. "Oh, no."

"What?" snapped Bruce. He glanced over his shoulder and out the front of the house, as though Clark might have spotted something on the horizon, and immediately felt like an idiot.

"Read the text you just got."

_LexCorp press conference, Channel 4._ Alfred. Bruce felt his stomach recapitulate the thing that had just happened to Clark's expression.

If there wasn't a television in the house, guests tended to remark on the absence. That had been by design, when this house was built, but as an adult Bruce had eventually given up and had one put in. It saved him a trip down to the cave now; the panel descended over the living room fireplace when he touched the button. 

LexCorp had selected their new face man to maintain the kinetic, chatty brand identity established by Lex Luthor, though Bruce knew that the behind-the-scenes picture was now the usual slate of cautious old men, the kind of people who could usually be trusted to try to end the world very slowly instead of all at once. The replacement spokesman gesticulated above the Channel 4 chyron, wearing a focus-grouped logo T-shirt and a sport coat with the sleeves pushed up. He had a forgettable, unlined face and studiedly unkempt hair. The effect was so soulless Bruce barely even wanted to punch him.

"... to NASA was always the plan," he was saying. "But you can thank our burglar, wherever you are out there —" he waved into the cameras like a Miss America contestant — "because we're giving it to the world now, too." Both arms up like a cheerleader. " _All_ of the research from Project Lazarus is now freely available to the public, in fifteen languages — including Dothraki, you're welcome — at this web address." A URL appeared above his shoulder on the video wall behind him, and he made a show of trying to position his hands so as appear to hold the text up like a waiter with a platter.

All right, Bruce did want to punch him.

"Do great things!" Diet Lex went on. "Surprise us! Laugh yourself to sleep thinking about some guy who went to the trouble of stealing research we just gave to _everyone on Earth_. Just don't get too into it, because we're going to want you back here on Thursday, at noon sharp, for the landing."

The top of the video wall came into frame; it was retracting into the platform. In the distance, again positioned artfully over the spokesman's shoulder, a scaffolding tower came into view — and then, gradually, the familiar Taj Mahal shape of a space shuttle and its three massive fuel tanks. This shuttle had that curvaceous post-NASA aesthetic that married spaceflight considerations with the look of a high-end vibrator. Its flank read _Lazarus I_.

"We're _so_ confident in the Lazarus entry system that we're moving our test launch up. As excited as we are to Mars whatever Mars NASA Marses with our technology, we're also just about wetting ourselves about this one: I am _very_ pleased to announce the first-ever manned orbital launch by a privately held organization, in about, oh, what time is it? Ten forty-three? In a little over fifteen minutes, then.

"Questions!" Luthor Lite spun a full rotation on his heel and pointed two-handed into the massed press at seeming random. The crowd erupted.

Clark had followed Bruce out of the kitchen; he held half a rasher of bacon, and for most of this announcement had stood beside Bruce, chewing the other half slowly. As the Q&A began he turned, without a word or sound, and made for the back door as though to walk directly out of the house with his unfinished bacon still between thumb and forefinger.

Bruce caught Clark by the arm. He immediately felt like a fool, but Clark did at least do him the courtesy of stopping a moment while he removed Bruce's hand from his biceps as though Bruce's grip were nothing. He was no more forceful than he had to be and moved at a sedate human speed; if he'd been anyone else, it would have been an opening.

Well, it had worked thus far. Bruce hooked his elbow around the back of Clark's and reached forward through the gap between Clark's arm and body, then up, to grab him by the back of the neck.

Under normal circumstances Bruce would now slam Clark's face into the floor and dig a knee into his back. Clark didn't so much as budge, but if he wanted to leave, his options were to spend a moment disentangling himself, carry Bruce with him, or tear Bruce's arm off.

He grabbed Bruce by the collar of his shirt instead. His thumb pressed against Bruce's collarbone, not far from where his smallest finger had marked Bruce's neck few nights ago. His weight shifted. Bruce caught his breath. This was the nearest they'd been since the morning of Clark's resurrection, and the first time they'd touched since then; it sent a hot silvery flare of arousal through Bruce, so sudden and fierce it nearly doubled him over. Clark was probably going to throw him through a window now, and he might let it happen just to have something new to jerk off to after he'd finished managing the PR disaster Clark was about to create.

"Oh," Clark said instead, with slowly widening eyes. "Oh, God."

Hell. "Don't," said Bruce.

Clark released Bruce at once, with force enough that only Bruce's hold on Clark prevented him from stumbling away. "I wouldn't—"

"Don't interfere with the launch."

That took the mental footing out from under Clark for a moment. "You're kidding." He peeled Bruce's hand off his neck, as effortlessly as he'd broken Bruce's previous grip.

Bruce let it happen; he'd bought some time, which was all he'd set out to do. "Think about this. How does it look if the League steals corporate secrets from LexCorp, then sabotages their orbiter?"

"I don't know, Bruce, like I have a problem with them playing with the corpse of a genocidal maniac, _again_?" Clark reached under his own arm and pulled Bruce's free.

"If they'd released that information, I guarantee you their press conference would have been nothing but spin about Zod finally doing some good for this planet, et cetera."

"Fine, we move _our_ press conference up."

"Everything I have is digital. It's completely falsifiable, as LexCorp would be quick to point out if we offer it as a justification for sabotaging their launch. And the site where I found your body is rogue, which gives LexCorp itself an additional layer of plausible deniability. It comes down to which story sounds more believable, and that sure as hell isn't ours."

"Is that thing even _safe_?" said Clark, jabbing his still-uneaten bacon at the television. His other hand still held Bruce's wrist. Bruce should probably pull away. "The crew—"

"If something goes wrong, do whatever you want. Until something does, revealing yourself like this will turn your first moments back in the public eye into a shitstorm. Is _that_ what you want? Superman returns from the dead with a crazy vendetta and takes it out on a corporation that formally cut ties with Lex Luthor?"

Clark's expression soured. "Were you this circumspect when you were deciding to kill me?"

"As a matter of fact, that was the culmination of a year and a half of research and planning."

An awful silence snapped its jaws shut around the both of them. Lex Luthor's understudy nattered into it from the television.

"For which I ... haven't had an opportunity to apologize," Bruce said, at last.

"A year and a half?" said Clark. "How long was the gap between seeing me on the news and deciding I needed to die?"

"I was in Metropolis when the Wayne Financial building went down."

The wind left Clark's sails, all at once. He dropped Bruce's wrist like he'd just realized they were still touching; Bruce tried not to regret it. They were still standing barely a foot apart, and Clark showed no intention of backing away; Bruce tried not to enjoy it.

"Okay," Clark said. Rubbing his mouth really did seem to just be a gesture of his. He noticed the bacon in his hand and ate it, finally. "We need something concrete enough to merit an official investigation."

"Yes."

"Do you have an angle on this?"

"What does your schedule for the rest of the week look like?"

* * *

The hatch of Bruce's transport craft opened onto churning water. Sea air gusted through the Flying Fox with such vigor that Bruce, up in the cockpit, felt it cool the exposed part of his face.

"Yeehaw," Arthur said flatly over his comm link. The greyscale image of him stepped into the hatch. He broke the surface feet-first, and the water closed neatly over his head; the glowing dot of his transponder plummeted through the depth hashes on another monitor, faster than a human could dive.

His departure eased the atmosphere a little. Clark and Diana traded glances with each other, then looked at Bruce simultaneously — Diana met his eyes dubiously via the video camera she knew was on the ceiling, and Clark just looked at him directly, through the wall of the cockpit. It was a lot of being looked at for one man. Diana didn't linger; she dived, spearing into the water with her outstretched hands.

Clark had no such decency, but Bruce was beyond the point of expecting him to ever just get the fuck on with anything. He hesitated with his foot at the edge of the hatch.

Yesterday, he'd followed Bruce back down into the cave and, as Bruce watched, had pressed the strange ribbons of his suit back together with his fingers. That was just how it opened and closed, apparently — though for Bruce it had refused steadfastly to open any farther when he was extracting Clark from it, or to close again once it was off.

It was on Clark now, and looked as pristine as it ever had. Bruce was sure he hadn't gotten all of the tank fluid out of the cape, which meant that either the suit could self-clean as well, or Clark had laundered it. The sight of him when he arrived this morning, descending again to the dock behind the lake house with the symbol gleaming on his chest and the sun caught in his cape, had briefly robbed Bruce of words.

Clark Kent was alive; Bruce had a grip on that. But _Superman_ was back, too.

He was still looking at Bruce, presenting his profile to the camera. Bruce tapped the bat and S symbols on his board, restricting their comms to each other.

"Insertion window opens in twelve minutes and ends in fifteen," he said, to Clark and only Clark.

It wasn't intimate. It was work.

"Right," Clark said. He shook his head a little, then dredged up half a smile. Bruce had thought he might float down to the water, but he dived like Diana had, like any person might dive into a pool.

Three blips descended on Bruce's monitor. Arthur and Clark, unbound by the laws of hydrodynamics, were faster than Diana in the water, but Arthur gave up his lead as he approached the sea floor, until his green dot and Diana's red one swam in tandem. Bruce hit the button that closed the Fox's hatch, then another that traded his video feed of the belly of the aircraft for a luminous blueprint. He unscrewed the lid on a flask of coffee.

At the depth where LexCorp had built its undersea research station, the pressure would crumple Bruce's lungs up like discarded tissues. Even with pressure gear, the threat of decompression sickness might prevent a timely retreat. No one on the team had questioned why Bruce had developed no workarounds for these problems, because apparently they still didn't understand how he operated, but did mean that no one had questioned him when he'd said he'd be sitting this one out in the plane, either.

His coming along might have stopped Clark and Arthur from having it out. Also, he didn't particularly want to have to hit up his hyperbaric chamber.

None of them spoke while they swam, though Clark might have been able to vocalize underwater. It still wasn't clear to Bruce how Atlanteans communicated in their natural habitat. Not with long whale-like moans; he'd asked. Repeatedly.

In six minutes, an unmonitored hatch would open into the water desalination system. Five minutes. Four. Bruce performed a countdown over the mostly silent comms.

Entry was nice and uneventful. Bruce didn't have eyes on-site, but GPS placed the three dots at about the right spot on his blueprint of the facility. Arthur started needling Clark again about thirty seconds after they were all breathing air again. Clark didn't rise to it, but the tension was palpable. Bruce held his tongue except to issue directions.

These three wouldn't have been his first pick for covert work. Diana by herself knew how to be circumspect, but Arthur brought out the most bombastic elements of her personality. The less said about Clark's relationship with the concept of stealth, the better. Collectively, they did have one thing going for them: an ability to detect trouble from afar, one way or another, and hurry down a different corridor before it could meet them. That would hold out only so long against security cameras, but with the low risk of intrusion at an undersea facility, the place wasn't particularly dense with them.

It took Arthur under five minutes to work his way around to, "I just don't see why we need a tagalong for this one." Bruce heard a pop that might've been Clark's jaw. "Vic would've been better. What do we do if Bats' security pass stops working, start ripping off doors?"

"This is Clark's mission," Diana said. "Not ours, or Bruce's. The question to ask is, why are _we_ here."

Bruce did Diana the favor of picturing her pointedly meeting his eyes as she said that. She was well aware of his habit of deploying her as social glue. If it bothered her, all she had to do to stop Bruce from doing it was develop a completely impossible personality to match the rest of the League.

"Because you're the only one both of us likes," Arthur said, "and everyone knows I would kick his ass back into space if I caught him dicking around down here without an escort. We have laws. The Indian Ocean's still full of space junk thanks to that shit that went down a few years ago."

"Wait," Clark said. "Am I — _banned from the ocean_?"

"You and your alien bullshit aren't _invited_ , that's for sure."

"Has this been true all along, or only since you learned he was alive?" said Diana.

"What happens if I go swimming?" said Clark, at the same time.

"Who cares," Arthur said; with only audio to go on, Bruce couldn't tell to whom. "You and me being surplus isn't exactly better. This guy's been back for five minutes and he's already running missions? Isn't the whole point of this League thing that Earthlings can get it done just fine?"

" _That's_ how you think of —" began Diana.

Bruce cut in. "Update. I need you to confirm you're in Habitat J East."

The line was briefly quiet while everyone downshifted. "We are," Clark said, finally. "Why?"

"I've lost your position on GPS," Bruce said, watching the three dots, the red and green and Clark's blue, proceed through his blueprint display. "Probably atmospheric interference."

"Okay," Clark said dubiously. "How much of a concern is this?"

"Not at all, most likely."

"Right. Keep us posted."

The interruption had the quelling effect Bruce had intended. The team on the ground proceeded in tense silence. Bruce poured himself another capful of coffee.

The objective lay about as far from their entry point as one could get in the base, past recreational areas and the mess, past the living quarters and meeting spaces, past even the laboratories, all the way to cold storage. It came to almost a quarter mile of metal tubes, each nearly groaning under the incredible pressure of the deep ocean; an underwater habitat was essentially a series of submarines joined by pressure doors, and this one had grown beyond its original ambit. It bristled with dead ends and double corridors.

It would've been interesting to have a running fight in. Hopefully this expedition wouldn't come to that, since any one of Bruce's teammates could tear the place apart singlehanded. Not a full-blown fight: just something to get the blood up a little.

He didn't get quite what he'd envisioned, and when it happened, it was so rapid and chaotic that he struggled to follow it — so, about par for this week's course. A terse confab about knocking the technicians in a lab unconscious turned into a shouted confrontation when they bungled the plan. Only one side of the conversation was properly audible to Bruce, but he could hear the panicky tones of whatever techs or security personnel the team was speaking to, and he could for damn sure hear the alarms when they began to bleat. He heard Clark saying things like, "There's no need for that," and Diana addressing at least three people by name. 

"Problem?" said Bruce, for the look of the thing.

"Not now," Clark and Arthur snapped in unison, which was the most cohesion they'd shown thus far.

The next sounds were Arthur cursing, and the _snap_ of water hitting each of their earpieces in quick succession. Bruce strained his ears, but the same silence that had reigned during the initial dive had reasserted itself: the silence of people who not only could not talk, but could not so much as cough or sniff. Did he hear water rushing? Objects colliding? A muffled yell? The microphones were communication, not surveillance, devices; they weren't tuned to pick up any of these things.

There had been at least three people in that room before it flooded. There were more than fifty in the habitat. If they died because Bruce had thought Clark and Arthur needed a fucking team-building exercise—

He'd stopped watching the depth monitor, but it caught his eye again when Diana's red dot began to ascend. Most likely, the other two were with her but had lost their earpieces. Which meant, probably, that the people in that chamber could not be helped, and perhaps that the entire research base was a lost cause.

"I need a situation report as soon as one of you is able to speak," Bruce said, and strained his ears into the silence for another five minutes before he heard anything other than intermittent microphone pops and banging.

It was Arthur. "What the hell."

"I store a couple hundred pounds of compressed air in the bottom chambers of my lungs," Clark said. "It stays pretty oxygenated."

"Weird," Arthur said, but Bruce knew how he sounded when he was impressed.

"Yeah, it is. How long can you hold the water out for?"

"You've got a couple of minutes."

"I requested a situation report," Bruce snapped.

"Everything's fine," Clark said. "Diana's on her way up to you with the Zod samples. Hi. Yeah, can you focus on me? You've just been rapidly compressed and decompressed, but not by very much. You're a little hypothermic. This other woman also has a broken ankle."

"Is that one of the people who was there when you arrived?" said Bruce.

"You'll all be fine if you get medical attention soon," Clark went on, ignoring Bruce. "A lot of people are going to burst in here in a moment, so tell them what I told you and make sure they take you and these two to the infirmary immediately."

"Direct answers to my questions would be preferable," Bruce said through his teeth.

"And I think I'm going to have to weld this shut once we leave, so tell everyone the wall is too hot to touch."

Clark's microphone might not pick up anything other than his own voice particularly well, but Bruce heard the technician he was speaking to say, "You're _Superman_ ," loud and clear.

"I guess I am," Clark said, with a rueful grin in his voice.

Bruce put his face in his hands.

"Hang on," Arthur said. "Grab that fish from under the table."

"It probably isn't going to make it," Clark said gently.

Bruce could almost hear Arthur roll his eyes. "Obviously. But no human's seen that species yet, and I'll be damned if these people get to be first."

"Got it," Clark said. "Okay, this is the last you'll hear from me for a while, Br— Uh, B."

"What will I do without you keeping me abreast of the situation," Bruce said flatly. He thought he heard Clark snort before the sea flooded his microphone again.

Diana reached the surface long before Clark and Arthur. Bruce lost altitude until the waves from the Flying Fox's downdraft almost slapped its belly, and she arrowed up out of the water and straight through the hatch. When she'd squeezed out her hair and poured the water out of her boots, she joined Bruce in the cockpit.

The samples she'd retrieved had gotten a thorough saltwater soaking, but most of the containers had held up and their labels were blessedly waterproof. What appeared to be the originals were five ovals of tissue, with a whorl of ridges at the center of each: the skin from the fingertips of Zod's left hand. The home-grown specimens began with a gnarled, fibrous lump of tissue and progressed — with very respectable alacrity, to judge by the dates on these archival samples — toward a neat grey brick that betrayed very little about its origins. Something a pack of idiots and madmen could use to tile a shuttle, with no one the wiser.

"That was ... less deft than I expect from you," Diana said, while Bruce was still examining their haul. It would have been nice to recover more research notes, but this was enough to go public with. They'd done it.

"Only because you give me too much credit," he said absently, and she laughed.

Clark and Arthur rocketed into the Flying Fox a minute later; Clark bore Arthur out of the water by what must have been the same handhold on the back of his armor that Victor used to transport him, and deposited him on the deck before touching down himself. For a moment Clark was magnificent, with the water running off him in rivulets and beading in the curls of his hair. Then he picked up the hem of his cape and began squeezing the water out of it. On the monitor, the grey figure of Arthur seemed to find this hilarious.

"Anyway," Bruce said, watching a smile steal over Clark's face, "it worked."

* * *

Round two was blessedly easier. Clark stuck out his hand, and Victor shook it.

"So, were you actually dead, or—" he said, and then, immediately, "Yeah, I guess you were."

Clark withdrew his hand slowly. "What makes you say that?"

"I'm not going to claim to understand how all the weird stuff inside you works, but it looks like you've only been metabolically active since last weekend or so."

"Good eye," Clark said. His brows had been rising steadily.

"Uh-huh. What happened?"

"This did," Bruce said, holding up a sample vial. Its contents showed brilliant green even in the dim lights of the Kryptonian ship.

He'd left Clark on the ship while he went down to the cave proper to call Victor and wait for his arrival. Cellular phones didn't work in here, and while Victor could have found his way — he had helped Bruce install the lead shield and Faraday cage on this wet chamber in the rock — that didn't mean he was invited to just show himself anywhere in Bruce's headquarters.

When Bruce had returned, Clark had just been standing where Bruce had left him in one of the ship's numerous apparently unlabeled corridors. He'd had his hands in the pockets of his slacks, like someone temporarily abandoned in a house where they were afraid to touch anything. This was the most intact artifact of Clark's people still on Earth, and Bruce had thought ... well, he'd played this wrong, that was all. Clark had at first seemed thrilled to learn the League had recovered the ship from Metropolis, but he'd turned solemn when it refused to respond to touch or voice commands.

Meeting Victor had restored a little of his animation. Bruce had momentarily taken it for mere politeness, the camera-friendly Superman act, but no: he'd seen people try to play it cool around celebrities and other objects of fascination before. Funny that there was anyone at all who could bring that out in the greatest legend of the modern era.

"I'm not drinking that," Victor said promptly.

"There's a story there," Clark said.

"The story is that your boy can drink his own alien sludge from now on," Victor said.

"Are you saying definitively that this is alien?" said Bruce.

"We're standing in an alien ship, with an alien. Would we be having this conversation about Earth sludge?"

"The only things I know about this are that it's green and it brings Kryptonians back to life." Bruce paused. "And that it broke my mass spectrometer."

"Define 'broke'."

"Broke as in I wouldn't have asked you to drink it regardless. We also need to look at some clonal tissue samples that—" Bruce had a vision of Victor sinking his teeth into a slab of cultured Zod skin and had to stop. "You're just here to get the ship online enough for its instruments to be usable."

"Yeah, I figured. You don't have to talk your way around to things, man."

Bruce stared up at the rippling metal ceiling and sighed. Beside him, Clark snickered.

The nerve center of the ship was a grey room utterly ravaged during Clark's fight with Zod. A ragged wound indicated where Clark had intercepted the ship in flight over Metropolis, and punched through its skin and several bulkheads to reach the bridge. Long melted scars arced across the wall, the ceiling, and the severed stem of an uncomfortable-looking pilot's chair that had once hung from the ceiling. While Victor investigated, Clark crouched to pick up some indecipherable heat-scarred fragment of rubble and turn it over in his hands.

Bruce leaned up against the curved doorframe and watched him watch Victor work. Apart from the deceptively mundane metal-shop sounds of cutting and welding, it was quiet enough on the bridge for even Bruce's human ears to pick up the thunder of the waterfall outside. Victor answered Clark's questions tersely, and though Clark was not deterred, Bruce could see his uncertainty about whether to interpret this as unfriendliness. He'd figure it out on his own; Bruce watched, and held his tongue.

Under Victor's hands — or whatever one called the ends of a person's arms when they were instead torches, or lasers, or nests of snaking cables — a structure of twisted scrap and wire grew from the floor above where the pilot's chair had once hung. Its crooked summit might have been a handrest from the chair; it had a hole in it, an inch across, with the same outline as the shield on Clark's suit.

Victor folded his right hand back at an improbable angle and extruded a jagged shape from his palm: two inches long, with a profile like the Metropolis skyline. End-on, though, it looked like it would fit into the hole on the pillar.

When he saw it, Clark caught his breath and straightened to his full height. Victor retracted this object at once.

"Sorry, do you have a real one?"

"No, I ... lost mine," Clark said. "Go ahead."

Victor gave a miniscule shrug, and the key reemerged from his palm. He pressed his hand against the console, and his biological eye went unfocused.

Bruce had anticipated the lights to coming up, the engines whirring to life. Clark must have imagined something similar; after a solid three minutes of nothing at all, he looked around uncomfortably and coughed, just a little. Bruce didn't expect that to break Victor's hacking fugue, and it didn't, but a little while later he withdrew his hand from the pillar and walked out of the bridge without a word. Clark trailed him bewilderedly, and Bruce followed Clark.

In turn, Victor was following something that lay behind the walls, some conduit of power or information which he checked in with every dozen paces by touching the walls or scanning them with his artificial eye. He led the two of them aft and then downward, to a circular, domed chamber ringed with what Bruce had guessed were standing workstations. They had no screens, and what he took to be the controls were just metal ridges and swoops. This could just as easily have been an extraterrestrial sculpture garden as some sort of control center. It had at least been largely undamaged in the eventful last few years, which was surely good for the ship's functionality and/or these important Kryptonian cultural artifacts.

Victor touched one of the "sculptures" and the design of radial swirls at the center of the floor split at its seams and irised open. Blue illumination filtered up to them, from points of light that shone along the sides of the cylindrical chamber below. A fluted black column hung in the center, suspended by nothing.

Bruce took a sharp step back from the edge, but Clark walked right up to it and crouched there on his toes, where he could watch Victor hop down into — what? The engine? Primary data storage? Whatever it was, the walls flickered under his metal hands when he touched them. Bruce had been all over this place, trying to understand the first thing about it, but he'd had no idea the floor opened.

"You must have other things you need to be doing," Clark said under his breath, like they were at a funeral or a play.

"That's always true," Bruce said, edging forward for a better vantage. "It's always a choice between one thing and a dozen other equally pressing things. I'm sure you've experienced this."

"Okay," Clark said, standing up straight. Bruce didn't know how to read it: skeptical? Pleased? But he was perilously aware of standing nearly shoulder to shoulder with Clark in a hushed, not unpleasant dimness.

This was an excellent sign. Things had been so awkward and adversarial between them at first that it had been hard to imagine settling into anything like a working rhythm. If they were learning, finally, to exist in the same space without constant friction, it might spell a real future for this whole damn enterprise.

Bruce thought again about how close they were standing, and folded his arms, just to be safe.

Whatever Victor had come here to ascertain, it was quick. He propelled himself back up to the deck where Clark and Bruce stood.

"The bad news is I can't get this up and running," he said, mostly to Clark. "The good news is that Barry can, which means I get to be around when he finds out you're alive."

"I'd prefer to bring Barry in on this in a more controlled fashion," Bruce said.

"Sure. Enjoy drinking your alien sludge."

Bruce sighed again. "I'll call him," he said, and trudged back down the corridor that had led them here.

Barry arrived in the time it took Bruce to make his way back to Clark and Victor on the Kryptonian ship. Bruce didn't bother trying to prevent him from letting himself into the ship; it was a good day if he could just be convinced not to fucking touch anything in the course of getting where he wasn't supposed to be. When he dropped down into a human timeframe, he was already talking.

"— like to think of my 'thing' more as Superspeed Guy than as Massive Energy Discharge Guy. I guess I have kind of a brand now, and if it gets out that you guys call me in every time you want to restart some piece of prehistoric space junk, they're going to start calling me, like, the Battery, or Jumpstart— Uhh, who are you?"

"Superman," Victor said, from down in the cylinder again. Clark had joined him down below while Bruce was out of the room, but with Barry's arrival, he floated back up to the deck.

"What the _fuck_."

"Nice to meet you too," said Clark, and offered his hand. Barry at first stared at it openmouthed, as though it were the most astonishing object in the universe, then lunged for it. Bruce had not previously had the privilege of witnessing a superspeed handshake. He was reasonably sure anyone other than Clark would have lost the hand.

"I'm so sorry, this is just kind of a huge — it is such an honor to— Oh my god, the first thing I ever said to Superman was 'what the fuck'." Barry was still blurrily pumping Clark's hand. "What are you doing hanging out with Bruce, did you two bury the hatchet? He's all about you but he's also, like, really clear about the object lesson of Don't Try to Kill Superman, Look How Grumpy and Sad It Makes You and I would have expected there to be bad blood— Oh my god, did he bring you back from the dead? Is bringing someone back from the dead after you try to kill them, like, backsies?"

The silence was thunderous. Barry's hand finally slowed to a halt. Bruce rubbed his face.

"Okay," Barry said slowly, "I guess that's too personal to lead with."

"No, that was a good guess," Clark said. "That's what happened. If you want to talk about being too forward, there's wearing Superman underwear the first time you meet me."

The color drained from Barry's face. One of Victor's infrequent laughs echoed up from the cylinder. Lightning coruscated down the length of Barry's body, and his hand glitched like a sloppy security cam footage edit: one instant it was still holding Clark's, and the next it was at his side. In that eye-blink, he seemed to have also rearranged his hoodie slightly.

"I can see it when you do that," Clark said.

"I need to leave because I'm physically dying," Barry said to Bruce.

"Start my prehistoric space junk and then you can go die wherever you want."

"What did he do?" said Victor, joining them up on the deck again.

"That's between him and me, for now."

"Did Superman come back _evil_?" Barry moaned.

"You can just call me Clark," said Clark, with a smile that could have charmed the birds down from the trees. Barry seemed, even after everything else, most devastated and horrified by this. It might have been the most relatable Bruce had ever found him.

Bruce cleared his throat. "As enlightening as this conversation has been, it's not why I requested your presence here."

The cylinder was the engine. Victor gave a summary of its workings that Barry seemed to be able to partially follow, Bruce could convincingly pretend to follow, and Clark absorbed with a fascination Bruce found entirely inscrutable. He could have understood every word of it or none at all. Among the many things Bruce didn't know about Clark was how long he had spent on this ship after he recovered it from the ice, and what he might have learned from it.

"So basically I need to run around in a circle down there," Barry said, at last.

"Try not to put your feet in the same spot twice," Victor said, and gave Barry a hand down into the chamber by extending his wrist until the length of his arm quintupled.

"Gotcha," Barry said echoingly.

Clark resumed his perch at the edge of the aperture, with his elbows resting on his knees; when Bruce came up to join him, Victor tried to wave him back from the edge. Metahumans just couldn't seem to help themselves sometimes. Bruce ignored him.

Barry stretched briefly, which Bruce suspected of being unnecessary, then adopted a runner's crouch that Bruce was _sure_ was unnecessary. Then, from Bruce's frame of reference, he disappeared.

In his place was a blur that progressed up the wall of the engine chamber in what must have been a spiral too shallow for Bruce to perceive its angle: it would take Barry hundreds of loops to reach the top. Where he passed, the dim blue starscape of the wall blazed to life and the engine filled with light, like a glass poured slowly full of water. The lightning that accompanied Barry's superspeed lingered where he had trod.

When the meniscus of Barry's upward progress was halfway up the chamber, the column at its center began to rotate; by the time he was three quarters of the way up, it had organized the electricity he'd left behind into writhing spokes. The underlighting on Clark's avid face turned gradually from blue to white. Just as Barry reached the lip of the chamber, Victor put his hand on one of the consoles.

The air on the ship changed, as though something new were breathing it with them. The dim overhead lights brightened. The walls and the entire dome of the ceiling rippled like a pond in an earthquake; Bruce ducked automatically, anticipating a cave-in, then had to quickly devise a way to make this look dignified when all that happened was the formerly smooth surface sculpting itself into reliefs of diagrams and Kryptonian writing.

Barry left the engine chamber at a speed great enough to eject him into the air, but slow enough that Bruce could see this happening; he rolled and skidded to a halt on the metal floor of the control room, then sprang up unharmed into a gymnast's victorious Y-pose.

"Holy shit, it worked," he said, dropping his arms. "I need pizza immediately. And also kind of still to die."

"I'm in," Victor said. "Just let me finish up here."

Barry had fetched up close enough to a wall to reach out and touch the symbols that chased each other across it. "Great," he said. "I'll buy the pizza, you buy the death."

"That was ... really cool," Clark said, and Bruce was lightheadedly aware, for the first time, that Clark was closer in age to Barry and Victor than to himself. Clark straightened up again beside him; Bruce took a half-step away to keep their shoulders from brushing.

"I like Good Superman," Barry said. "Where was this Superman a couple of minutes ago when you were making me piss myself?"

"Available by appointment only," Clark said vaguely. Bruce's movement had caught his attention, and he seemed momentarily more interested in that than in making fun of Barry.

"Hands off," Victor said. Bruce started, but Victor had meant the injunction for Barry, who had reached for one of the consoles. He beckoned to Clark. "Come here and put your hand on this."

Clark pulled his gaze off Bruce and did as he'd been asked with what seemed to Bruce to be amazingly little resistance, questioning and bullshit. He slipped his fingers into the the hand-shaped depression Victor had indicated, and the overhead screen reconfigured itself; a liquid-metal bas relief of his face emerged from the wall — Clark flinched — then smoothed out into columns of Kryptonian text.

"I'm giving you full ownership," Victor said. "It's set to Kryptonian, but I gave it some Earth languages. All the can-we-eat-this stuff in the lab is in pretty good shape, so you should be able to get your data without my help. But all I've got happening right now is pizza, so call me if there's a problem."

"Yeah, I won't keep you." Clark looked at Barry, then at Victor again. "Thanks. What you both did here today is amazing."

Barry turned beet red and made a jerky motion like he was thinking about shaking Clark's hand again from twelve feet away. Victor just nodded.

"Something you should know," he said. "This thing's in pretty rough shape, but it's a long-haul ship. It's self-repairing. It should be possible to get it in the air again."

A grin broke over Clark's face. "I'd love that. Is there a number where I can get in touch with you?"

"I just put it in your phone."

Maybe he also made the phone vibrate, because Clark jumped a little and touched his back pocket. "Perfect. I'll see both of you soon, I hope."

"How far away do I have to be before you can't see me anymore?" said Barry. "Asking for a friend."

"Off-planet."

Bruce had seen Barry take chest wounds better than he took that. They were all lucky Victor was there to maneuver him off the ship.

"That was a tour de force," Bruce said, joining Clark by the console where he still stood. Without any pyrotechnics to spectate, it seemed less reasonable to stand close to him, to ignore the question of whether the distance between their bodies was decorous.

"You've been quiet," Clark said.

"Hm," Bruce said. "Victor said something about 'can we eat this'?"

"Yeah. This was a scout ship, so the chemical analysis equipment, all of that stuff, has a bias toward how things interact with Kryptonian biology. Should suit our purposes just fine."

"A scout ship."

"Krypton had an expansionist period."

They grimaced in unison.

"Anyway," Clark said, "those two seem pretty great. I should have been nicer to Barry."

"He'd follow you into Hell," Bruce said. Clark chuckled.

"Let's solve the problem in front of us before you go making any more big plans for me."

Bruce jerked like he'd been bitten. He met Clark's eye and found him not smiling, but some liveliness in the set of his mouth suggested that could change quickly. This could go multiple ways; Bruce felt the responsibility of choosing which settle on him.

"A man died," he said. "Be respectful."

The echoes of Clark's laughter chased each other through the metal corridors of the ship.


	3. Chapter 3

Clark convened the League again the next morning, in the Flying Fox. Clark did, not Bruce. They were his to lead; maybe even Arthur understood now that he always _had_ led alongside Diana and Bruce, through them if not in his own person.

He'd certainly gotten through to Arthur on one level or another: Arthur had showed up twice in a week, which was better than Bruce could count on. Apparently there were a lot of interesting weather patterns and important fish migrations that required the attention of royalty, and it was amazing how often they overlapped with League business.

Bruce's grand plans for integrating Clark into the League had not necessarily included Clark operating out of Bruce's plane as though he owned it, but if Victor was right about the Kryptonian ship, Clark would have his own airborne base of operations soon enough. Bruce could convert that part of the cave back into storage, and something like normal life might resume.

For now, he found himself watching Clark over the monitors in the cockpit again.

Clark concluded the briefing and saw the rest of the League off in pairs: Diana and Arthur, who dived in tandem from the hatch in the belly of the plane and plummeted gracefully the hundred feet to the surface of the ocean; and then Victor and Barry. Victor picked Barry up by the back of his suit and bore him away toward shore, where Barry could run the rest of the way to the LexCorp assembly yard Clark had put them on. Bruce had no idea how Barry and Arthur dealt with this. Some of Bruce's sweaty nightmares about this horrific mode of transportation were certainly about Clark and the complexities of their relationship, but some of them were just because no dignified adult should be carried around like a puppy, and Bruce was no longer entirely confident that he would be able to avoid that indignity forever.

On the monitor, Clark turned in a ripple of cape and headed for the cockpit. Bruce closed the hatch and took them upward.

Clark took up a lot of space; it wasn't exactly possible to miss his presence in the cockpit, which was barely large enough for two people to stand in. Still, for a while he said nothing. He rested his hand on the back of the pilot's chair and watched the other Leaguers' transponder dots progress on two of Bruce's monitors.

They'd last seen each other about four hours before meeting again on the Fox. Just as Bruce was taking off, Clark had skimmed in over the lake and Bruce had opened the hatch for him. Waiting for the scout ship's mathematical models to mature had kept them up late, and hashing out a plan had kept them up even later; at the end of the night, Bruce had almost, unthinkingly, offered Clark the cot in the cave — the same one he'd lain on while Bruce waited for him to regain consciousness after his resurrection. Bruce was getting too comfortable with Clark, forgetting his own priorities.

But no, Bruce had held his tongue, and Clark had rocketed off to wherever it was he was spending his downtime at the moment; Kansas, Bruce assumed. And with the empty cot right there, Bruce had not had to haul himself all the way up to the lake house to grab a couple of hours of sleep.

As soon they'd gotten all-clear reports from Victor and Diana, Clark leaned across Bruce's body and tapped their insignias to isolate them on comms. "Babies don't thrive if they aren't held," he said.

"... _what_?" said Bruce. His voice modulator turned it into a snarl.

"Bear with me. Babies need to be held. They need to be picked up and touched or their bodies and their brains won't develop correctly."

Bruce half-turned the pilot's chair for a better look at Clark. "Is this about Zod somehow?"

"Bruce," Clark said. "Shut up for a minute."

All right. Bruce continued to stare at Clark without comprehension, but he could at least do it silently.

"I used to worry," Clark went on, "that there was something I needed developmentally that my human parents didn't know how to give me, because they just weren't like me. I worried that I'd end up malformed somehow, in some way I didn't even know how to detect. One end of that thought is, what if someone who _is_ like me shows up and they don't recognize me because I grew up wrong, and the other end is, what if I hurt someone."

The Fox broke through the cloud cover and into an infinite dome of blue sky. Light flooded the cockpit, and the colors of Clark's suit and eyes blazed to life. The sun was almost directly overhead; the _Lazarus I_ would be coming in for a landing soon. And then, if the lab on the Kryptonian ship was to be believed, all hell would break loose.

"Everything ends up at _what if I hurt someone_ , of course. Should I try alcohol. Should I go on the date. Should I put on the suit. I've spent so much time trying to not to hurt people that you'd think I'd be good at it.

"It was —" Clark's voice wavered. Bruce saw him reach for some stronger, more melodramatic term, then edit himself down. "— lonely. I was very lonely for a long time. Then I met some Kryptonians, and that was worse, and I killed them, and that was even worse."

Clark looked out through the windshield at the undulating plain of clouds that surrounded them, then up, at the place where the _Lazarus I_ 's flight path would intersect Earth's atmosphere. Bruce couldn't see the shuttle yet, but maybe Clark could.

"I'm probably the only one of my kind," he said.

He gestured past Bruce at the communication board he'd invited himself to interfere with a moment ago, where the symbols of each League member formed a row beneath their respective transponder data.

"And so are all of them."

He didn't spring the kiss on Bruce. He met Bruce's eye and leaned down slowly, and Bruce, riveted, watched the whole process; he knew it was coming. He just didn't believe it was happening until their mouths met.

Clark wasn't tentative. Of course not; the agonies of lust Bruce had suffered in his presence over the last week hadn't exactly been subtle. He kissed Bruce openmouthed and not especially politely, with his forearm still resting on the back of the pilot's chair and his free hand curled under Bruce's chin. Still, Bruce had reason to expect a certain degree of conviction from Clark that he wasn't getting yet.

He rose sharply from the pilot's chair. Clark took a half-step back to accommodate him, and Bruce shoved him back another half-step, until his back struck the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the passenger cabin. It would have driven the breath from anyone else; Clark just laughed. When Bruce closed in to kiss him again, Clark's hands rose at once to slip up Bruce's back, under his cape. The sensation undammed a flood of memories of the last time Clark had touched him like that. Bruce bit involuntarily at Clark's mouth; Clark arched between Bruce's body and the wall, and his hands clenched into fists against Bruce's back.

Here he was. This was Clark as Bruce remembered kissing him, consuming and totally intent. Bruce half-disengaged to take a breath and Clark just yanked him back in by the back of the neck, with a hand as unyielding as iron. His other hand wandered, catching on Bruce's zipper, on seams, on buckles; on each they'd linger tensely, as though simply tearing the suit off of Bruce to get at him was a strategy he might not reserve only for semiconscious gropings.

One of these days, Bruce was going to fucking let Clark do it. He was wearing an absolutely inconceivable amount of body armor; Clark was _back from the dead_ and _touching Bruce with his bare hands_ and Bruce could feel nothing but his mouth, his teeth, his demanding tongue; even where the tip of Bruce's nose touched Clark's cheek, the cowl interceded.

Clark interlocked their legs and rubbed his body up against Bruce, from shoulders to thighs, with a now-familiar sound of the textures of their respective suits meeting. Bruce couldn't feel a damn thing other than the vibration and the generalized pressure of Clark's body against his — but with a tremor of heat, he remembered that Clark very much could. He was probably wearing underwear today — though, on the other hand, what if he wasn't — but during their first encounter, this friction alone had been enough to make Clark hard. Bruce hadn't even had a week of sexual tension on his side at the time.

He was just reaching down when an alarm chirped at them from the console.

"Damn it," he said, and took Clark's face in his hands, and kissed him again while he still could.

"Is that the—" Clark began, muffled. His visible eye widened. "Time to go," he said.

"Yeah," Bruce said. Clark had reached for the handle of the door; Bruce put his hand over Clark's and stroked, with his maddeningly insensate glove, the tendon of Clark's wrist, and the boundary between his suit and the bare skin of his hand.

Clark's eyes went heavy-lidded, and he let Bruce kiss him for one more instant, then pushed Bruce bodily back into the pilot's chair. He exited the cockpit with such force that Bruce was probably going to have to repair at least the handle of the door. Bruce reached out for the dashboard and slapped the release for the hatch just in time for the figure of Clark on his video feed to dive through it unimpeded. Clark disappeared from the monitor, but appeared an instant later through the windshield, streaking away through the sky with his red cape snapping behind him like a flag.

Beyond him, a new star burned in the blue. The _Lazarus I_ wasn't close yet; Clark would have to slow it down considerably before Bruce or the Flying Fox could be of any use. For the moment he just had to wait, like everyone else.

Unlike everyone else, he was in control of comms.

"You could have done this absolutely any time since Monday, and you choose _now_?" His voice came out throatier than he'd intended. His suit was a multimillion-dollar investment, engineered for his body from the ground up, but right now it felt like it didn't fit him.

Clark might have tried to reply, but his earpiece couldn't pick it up when he was flying faster than the sound of his own voice could travel. That made this the perfect time to harangue him — and Bruce did have more to say, but what welled up was so raw that he found himself biting the inside of his mouth to hold it in; he made a harsh noise into the connection, and that was all. After a few seconds, Clark answered with a single tap on his earpiece.

It would do. Bruce reopened comms to the rest of the team.

"Superman is engaging the shuttle. Status on the ground?"

"All quiet here," Barry said, at the same moment that Diana, unable to speak either while she was underwater, tapped an all-clear into her earpiece.

"Stay alert," Bruce said.

"Well, I'd been really thinking about taking a nap," Barry said. Bruce considered turning off his earpiece altogether.

The _Lazarus I_ looked like a point of light to Bruce, instead of like a long streak of brilliance across the sky, because it was coming almost directly at him. As he watched, its dot stretched horizontally; it was veering off course. At this distance, it looked like a lazy swing to Bruce's right, but to the shuttle's crew of six the gravitational forces must have been incredible. Clark, a red-and-blue fleck to Bruce's eye now, darted to intercept it. Bruce disengaged the Flying Fox's autopilot and set off in pursuit.

"Major course deviation," he said. "If you're going to see a reaction, it will be soon."

"Nothing yet," Victor said. Bruce chose to picture him with his hand over Barry's mouth.

As he drew closer, Bruce could see the shuttle tumbling end-over-end inside its envelope of reentry flame. Clark connected with it and became a whirling streak of color for a few revolutions, then either disengaged or was thrown free. Something pale stretched momentarily between it and him; when it snapped back, the force of the rebound sent the shuttle careening off in a new direction. Clark braked in midair and seemed to take stock for an instant, then swooped in for another round.

"Secondary reaction confirmed," Victor said neutrally. "Okay, when it happens it's fast as hell. Moving in."

"Diana?" said Bruce, but all he got from her was another all-clear tap. "All right. There's a delay that may correlate to altitude. Your first priority is civilian lives; your second priority is keeping the Zod tissue out of direct sun; your third is transporting it somewhere that Superman can collect it from when he's done up here."

"Understood," Victor said.

"Oh my god, look at that," Barry said. "This is _bonkers_. And ... wow, pretty gross."

"Team C, now that you're engaging, I'm isolating you to each other on comms. Use your override as necessary, but assume I'm busy and don't want to talk to you." Bruce caught a chuckle over the line just before he tapped the comms board. 

Clark was having better luck with the shuttle this time. He had slowed its rotation enough for Bruce to make out something other than a grey-white blur with a smear of red and blue across it. It was traveling faster than the Flying Fox's top speed and more or less directly away from it, but its midair wrestling match with Clark made its flight path so erratic that Bruce could gain ground on it slowly, if he pushed the Fox's engines a little farther than they wanted to go.

The shape of the shuttle resolved in his vision. It was already one fourth again its original size. Its smooth grey-white tile had erupted in lumps and venous ridges. Soaked in unattenuated solar energy during its time in space, roused by the intense abrasion and heat of atmospheric reentry, it grew before Bruce's eyes. As he watched, a spasm rippled across the alien skin of the craft, and the spine of the _Lazarus I_ bowed under the stress.

Kryptonian invulnerability had something to do with a field that permeated their tissues, that repelled injury and sent energy where it was needed. "According to this, I could reattach a limb if I had to," Clark had said to Bruce last night, with horrified skepticism. But the field wasn't discriminating, and distance couldn't break it. Every scrap of tissue from the body of General Zod that wasn't presently encased in lead was as energized as the shielding on this shuttle. When one was injured, they all responded. When one grew, they would all grow — and grow without limit, until they merged with each other, as though closing over a wound the size of the world.

Clark half-stood, half knelt on the fuselage of the _Lazarus I_ , at an angle that made his contempt for gravity particularly evident. He was yanking at handfuls of the shuttle's exterior, with his footholds for leverage — trying to peel it like a banana, Bruce realized. Clark's whole body was bent to the task, every sinew taut. Just as it was starting to look like the tile might come away from the shuttle's frame, he lost his grip again. The immense forces involved in anything that could make _Superman_ strain like that sent the craft careening off in one new direction, Clark in another.

Bruce pulled right on the Flying Fox's control yoke with all his strength. A second later, Clark cartwheeled through exactly the place where the Fox would have been if Bruce hadn't hustled out of the way. A powerful shudder that came up through his boots and the control column told him how near that miss had been; Clark must have grazed the belly of the plane with a hand or a toe.

Diana tapped her earpiece: she and Arthur were on. There was a crackle of ambient noise as she moved from water to air.

"I read you," Bruce said. "Team B, I'm isolating you as well. Good luck."

Clark was back a moment later, flying under his own power; he slapped a hand on the Fox's windshield and met Bruce's eye through the glass. Bruce failed to stop himself from giving Clark a once-over to make sure he was intact. Of course he was fine. The night of his death, he hadn't been able to kill Lex Luthor's monster without kryptonite, but the monster hadn't seemed to be able to harm Clark, either. This substance on the shuttle was of the same stuff as that creature, and it wasn't even truly hostile. Clark was virtually indestructible; he wasn't going to die again on the first damn mission.

"I can't control its spin and get the shielding off at the same time!" shouted Clark. Bruce got more from lip-reading him than he could get over his earpiece, even at this subsonic speed. "I need you to help me stabilize it!"

"Can you try just getting the crew out—"

"No go, the doors are grown over!"

"So go in through an engine—"

"And bring the crew back out the same way? Through a flaming—"

"I have no idea what the Hell use you expect me to be if you can't bring the crew to me."

"You could be more constructive, for starters!"

Bruce muted his earpiece. "Unbelievable," he said.

"I can hear you just fine with your communicator off!"

Bruce took his finger off the button. "Do you have a plan?"

"Fire up the tow magnets. I'm going to nudge the shuttle over to you."

"There's no way I can match that thing's speed."

"Yeah," Clark said. "I'm going to have to accelerate you." He peeled himself off the windshield without another word.

"Don't you dare," Bruce said. He craned his neck, but he couldn't get a visual on Clark. Not that it was hard to guess where he'd gone. "This craft isn't designed for those speeds, and it sure as Hell isn't designed for you to _get out and push_. You'll rip the wings off."

Clark had more to say to that, but whatever it was, the wind tore it away. Probably some brazen reassurance, if the lurch Bruce felt was anything to go by. His airspeed indicator ticked higher than the Fox could go, then higher than it ever ought to. A great rattling began in the bones of the plane, and grew to completely fill Bruce's awareness. He gritted his teeth against it, and locked all of the Fox's external moving parts in place before wind resistance could start tearing off ailerons.

The _Lazarus I_ inched closer, in his windshield and on his radar both. It still spun freely through the expansive blue sky — slow enough for a human eye to follow now, at least, but by no means a controlled flight. Its nose and wingtips described lazy circles in the air. Its path curved slowly; left to its own devices, it would eventually spiral down through the cloud cover and to the — ground? Bruce had lost his sense of where they were and where to expect the shuttle to come down. Its original target in the Atlantic was, at this point, clearly very much out of the question.

He lost sight of the shuttle at around the same time the Fox's quaking became so intense that he knew he couldn't hope to be spared a structural failure much longer. Only his seat in the pilot's chair kept the great hand of gravitational force from plastering him against the back wall of the cockpit, and that might not last much longer; under the rattling he could hear the chair's creaks of protest.

Bruce was just about ready to call uncle over comms when the vibration eased, ever so slightly. He began losing velocity at once, though at this rate he'd still be going unreasonably fast for a while.

A collision alarm sounded. The _Lazarus I_ was almost upon him.

It touched the bottom of the Flying Fox with bewildering precision: two large objects moving at impossible speeds, just barely kissing each other in midair. If he had known this was in Clark's repertoire — that he could administer godlike elemental fury, but also act with this incredible delicacy and care — the last couple of years of both their lives might have gone very differently.

The contact still jarred the plane hard enough to make Bruce's teeth clatter. The spinning had probably knocked the _Lazarus I_ crew unconscious, and who knew what their air situation was like at the moment, but if any of them was alert they were probably not pleased with this development.

Bruce hit the switch for the tow magnets. They were meant to be deployed from the bottom of the Fox, not used to attach things directly to the craft willy-nilly, but needs must. He didn't have to wonder if they had worked; the whole plane screamed from the structural stress of reconciling its own flight path with the shuttle's slightly different one.

He unlocked the Fox's control surfaces in hopes of correcting for the spin the _Lazarus I_ had lent it, and immediately lost an aileron. Exactly the aileron he had been worried about, in fact. Damn it. At low speeds, he could have compensated with the takeoff engines, but for now he was helpless.

"I'm losing parts, Clark. I'm sure you're busy, but I might need a course correction."

Some impact rang through the ship: Clark slapping the belly of it in acknowledgement, Bruce hoped. All the other possibilities were some combination of catastrophic and disgusting.

"How are we doing on the crew?" he said.

Clark slapped the outside of the ship again. Good enough. Bruce devoted his full attention to fighting his controls for every inch they would give him. It was going respectably well until he glanced up at the monitor that still looked into the hold, at the hatch through which Clark had departed earlier.

The reentry tile of the _Lazarus I_ , the cultured skin tissue of the conqueror Zod, was growing into the Flying Fox through the gaps around the hatch.

Another slap rang through the Fox, in response to nothing in particular. That wasn't Clark.

Bruce yanked the autopilot control and lunged up out of his seat without particularly considering what he was going to do about this. He didn't stop until he had slammed through the door into the hold — until he was in the same space as the mass of alien tissue that had invaded his plane, breathing air it had perhaps touched.

"Superman," he said. "Tap your earpiece if you can hear me."

The Zod skin crept across the corrugated floor of the Fox like a viscous liquid. Lacking melanin or blood, it was as innocuously off-white here as it had been on the shuttle; it looked barely biological until the layer of it on the floor thickened and began to form tumorous knots. Close to the hatch, the surface of it roiled and split as parts of the mass grew faster than other parts could accommodate, revealing fast-growing new layers of the same off-white beneath.

Five seconds passed, ten. Nothing. From Clark, at least. The Zod tissue bulged in the gap around the hatch; the hatch, and the floor around it, creaked and buckled. Okay.

"Superman, report as soon as you're able. I need assistance on the Flying Fox."

Bruce nailed the advancing edge of the Zod skin with a canister of liquid nitrogen from his belt, just to see. No reaction. 

During his fight with Clark, the thing that had slowed Clark down the most — well, the second most — had been focused sound. That strategy had relied heavily on Clark having ears, though, and in any case nothing on the inside of the Fox could deliver the sound pressure it had taken to properly annoy a Kryptonian. The external speakers could, but he couldn't exactly direct them at the hold. Bruce had come prepared for runaway tissue growth like this _outside_ the Fox, where he could bring all of the Fox's external weapons to bear on it and didn't have to worry about it simply overrunning and suffocating him.

It was ankle high and it covered more of the floor every second. Bruce gave it a couple of minutes before there was nowhere left to stand in the hold, and maybe twenty before the room was filled floor to ceiling.

He swiped at the mass of flesh with an extensible baton, just to see what happened. The flowing edges of the mat split and ran around the end of the baton like water; the gnarled lumps farther in were almost as amenable to the intrusion, but once the baton had sunk in a few inches, the tissue around it seized and yanked it from Bruce's hand with a strength commensurate with its origins. All right, he couldn't exactly fist-fight the stuff.

The plane lurched. Autopilot could do only so much in a scenario like this. And Bruce could do only so much here, in a room full of something he couldn't fight or control. He turned to go just as another lurch hit; this one sent the plane and shuttle into a spin that slammed Bruce against the nearest wall. He felt his boots fail to grip the floor, and fired his grapnel from the hip just as that bastard physics lifted and threw him. The hook of his grapnel sailed through the open door to the passenger cabin and caught on the arm of a chair. Bruce struck the ceiling with enough force to drive the breath from him, then fell straight toward the recently colonized floor.

In the instant before his grapnel yanked him away, the soles of his boots just brushed the surface of the growing mat of alien flesh. The bolts that secured the passenger chair to the floor protested, but held, then protested again when he fetched up against it. Bruce shoved himself up into the closest thing to a standing position he could achieve with his plane's spin doing its level best to throw him around like a ragdoll, and unhooked his grapnel.

The door to the hold lolled open; from the other side, Bruce heard the squeal of bending metal as the sheer mass of the overgrown Kryptonian tissue forced the exterior hatch wider. He slammed the interior door shut, then muscled down the lever that actuated the airtight seal. That might buy him a few minutes, if Clark didn't make his presence known again soon.

Speaking of.

"Superman, report."

Bruce staggered up the aisle of the passenger cabin while he waited for a reply he did not expect to receive. Gravity made several attempts to crush him against the starboard wall; he fought through it to the cockpit and flung himself into the pilot's chair.

He hadn't been able to check his altimeter for several minutes, but now that he was in front of a window, he didn't need one to see that they had better resolve this quickly. Metropolis filled his vision.

Of course it would be Metropolis. He'd always felt bad for Metropolitans on principle, but the last few years had turned that from Gothamite disdain to heartbroken sympathy.

Bruce glanced at the feed from the camera in the hold. The cloned tissue was ascending the walls now; it sloshed like water but also bunched like flesh. It would fill the hold and burst it. He could buy a few minutes by relinquishing the passenger cabin to it as well, but one way or another, the Flying Fox wouldn't be airworthy much longer.

"Clark, if you're able to communicate at all, this would be a good time to say something."

Clark's transponder said he was still on or very near the Fox. There was every likelihood he was still wrestling with his own section of the shuttle's tile, and having as much trouble with it as Bruce was. Bruce knew perfectly well that his earpiece was useless at these speeds.

Or he could have been overwhelmed. This stuff was as tough as Clark was, and it might have simply rolled over him like a wave. He could be suffocating right now, pinned to the side of the _Lazarus I_. In which case Bruce would die shortly, the crew of the shuttle were probably already dead, and in a few minutes these two aircraft would come down in one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas on Earth and everyone there would die as well. And there wasn't a damn thing one human trapped inside a wildly spinning tin can could do about it.

Except, maybe, arrest the growth of the Zod tissue.

Bruce's hand descended to his belt. His thumb touched the catch on a lead-lined utility compartment.

If it affected the overgrown flesh, it would affect Clark too. Bruce's best hope was perhaps that it would knock Clark out of the air, and he would have time to recover before he hit the ground. With the runaway growth slowed by kryptonite, the rest of the League would have time to deal with it before it completely overran the surface of the Earth.

Unbelievable. Their first mission together.

On the monitor, the white mass half-filling the hold twitched. Bruce almost opened his belt compartment on reflex; he leaned in for a closer look instead, then sharply backward again when all of the Zod tissue vanished down out of the hatch like a sea creature flinching back into its shell at the touch of a human hand. The Flying Fox spun in a new direction, with such violence that Bruce was sure he felt his organs slam against his ribcage; he had to grab for the console to retain his seat and keep his eyes on the monitor.

The hatch was huge and misshapen now, and through it, he could see the bare metal of the _Lazarus I_.

Clark rocketed past the windshield, blue and red and shining. He was towing an immense pale mass of clonal tissue — not less than a couple of tons of it, and it was still growing before Bruce's eyes. He flew straight up with it; in seconds even that massive object was just a dot, and then it was gone.

Dropping all that weight helped. The controls fought Bruce only half as hard; by comparison, they felt almost sprightly. He had his spin nearly under control when Clark reappeared, rolling and twisting through the air alongside the Flying Fox like a dolphin pacing a sailing ship. He touched the windshield for just a moment before disappearing under the Fox; Bruce took his hands off the controls and watched the instrument panel calm down as Clark set the plane straight.

He didn't realize they'd slowed enough for comms to be relevant again until Clark said in his ear, "Okay, I can take it from here. Turn off the magnets."

"We need a better system for communicating when you're flying at high speed," Bruce said, but hit the control for the magnets again.

"Sorry," Clark said. The strain in his voice made him sound like he was lifting something on the order of a heavy box, not a space shuttle. "Didn't have a hand free. I didn't realize how worried you were going to get."

Bruce swallowed a derisive laugh. Of course. Clark had no reason to know how his first death had affected Bruce, or what a second one would do to him. He'd been dead while all of that happened.

"How about I put this down right by the launch platform?" Clark was saying.

"Fine. I'll pace you. How's the crew?"

"Pretty banged up, but everyone's alive. Can you call ahead for—"

"On it."

The ambulances actually beat them there. So did the news vans. There was a cordon, at least. It was a nice big tarmac on the outskirts of Metropolis, edged on one side with woodland and on the other with a LexCorp industrial park that would definitely be shutting down after all this was said and done. Bruce could hardly wait.

Clark was carrying the last of the astronauts out of the _Lazarus I_ when Bruce put down. It was only when he swung open the door of the Fox and found himself hesitating in the dimness of the interior that he realized his mistake. He wasn't needed here; he'd be more use back at headquarters, coordinating over comms. He was just moving toward Clark, like some idiot moth desperate for its own immolation.

As though he'd heard that thought, Clark looked up from the woman he was easing down onto a gurney. He shot Bruce a grin, brilliant and victorious in the midday sun.

He exchanged a few words with an EMT, patted the hand of the unconscious astronaut, and turned away, toward the massed reporters with their cameras and their microphones. It was a long walk to the cordon. He blazed with color the whole way.

"Hi," he said. The press were losing their minds, but his voice rang out clearly over their questions. "It's really me. I'd love to tell you how I'm alive, but I don't have a good explanation yet. Some of the best minds on Earth are working on it, so — soon, I hope. All I can tell you is how glad I am to be here.

"I can't take your questions now. This LexCorp project nearly cost the lives of these six astronauts and many, many other people, and there's still more cleanup to do before I can stop to talk.

"So, for now—" He turned to point past the ambulances, at Bruce. "This is my colleague, who I'm sure you know as the Gotham Bat. He'd be more than happy to answer any questions you have."

* * *

Clark flew in over the lake again. So, that was just how he preferred to approach the house. That was just his habit, when he came to see Bruce.

Bruce sat at the workstation in the cave and watched him over the perimeter cameras. Clark had changed into jeans, tie, collared shirt — probably some subdued plaid, but with night approaching it was hard to tell. Bruce had put on civilian clothes as well, after some press torture, quite a bit of comms time with the rest of the League, and a long scalding shower; he'd autopiloted his way into a fresh suit.

They looked like they'd dressed for dates to different places. Fuck.

Bruce snatched his jacket up from the back of his chair and shrugged it on as he headed up to the house to greet Clark. He was just alighting on the dock when Bruce opened the door for him.

"Hey," Clark said, with the lake behind him reflecting the dimming sky, with a chorus of singing frogs swelling around him. Bruce had guessed right about the plaid.

He didn't have a reply for that; Jesus, this was going great already. But when he stepped back from the door, Clark invited himself inside, and leaned casually up against the kitchen table as though there were no question of his welcome. Which there wasn't. Bruce had just expected getting here to be a lot more work.

Maybe Diana was on to something about coming to know people through battle after all.

"All right, so," Clark said, "I aimed all of the...." He trailed off, and gestured as though holding something round with both hands. They'd all struggled with the terminology. " _Zod blobs_ at an orbit around Pluto."

"You flew to Pluto and back in the last six hours?" Bruce closed the door after Clark and trailed him into the kitchen. 

"I didn't actually go much past Saturn myself."

"Exactly how fast are you?"

"Um, faster than I had realized."

"Jesus." Bruce felt that terrified, exhilarated pulse all through his body that accompanied these reminders of Clark's capabilities. He'd been too busy earlier to be properly floored by any of Clark's feats, but now it was just the two of them, and a future that stretched out in all directions.

Clark turned scarlet. "Uh," he said, then smiled self-effacingly past Bruce, like he'd caught himself doing something foolish. "I was going to say, the orbits are pretty complicated out there. I'll need to head back and check on it tomorrow. Also, they're growing a lot less vigorously now that the blobs are all together, but they're definitely still growing."

"I don't like having an extinction scenario just floating around in the outer solar system," Bruce said, trying not to be too obvious about his struggle to decide how much space to leave between himself and Clark. Coming here for a postmortem didn't mean he was ready to follow up on what had transpired on the Fox. Bruce was far past hiding the effect Clark had on him, but he could at least wait for a lull in the conversation before he inserted himself into Clark's personal space. He settled for leaning against the counter.

"Yeah, I've been thinking about that," said Clark, suddenly animated. "Do you still have any of that green rock you used for the head of the spear?"

Bruce's pleasant speculation about closing the distance evaporated. Clark's death was still a hot shard between his lungs — but for a while it had not been. He'd spent all day and most of the night talking to Clark, kissing him, reveling in his laugh, even fearing he might die wrestling the _Lazarus I_ , and not once reflected that the reason a second death would be so devastating was that Bruce himself had been intimately involved in the first.

He hesitated so long that Clark drifted over to the kitchen counter and leaned on it next to him. Their shoulders almost touched. "Barry was right, you know," Clark said. "Resurrecting someone is backsies."

Bruce rubbed his face with the heels of his palms. "Please don't use that word."

Clark cracked a smile, but went on, "Is it going to be this big production every time one of us brings up that whole thing? What do we have to do to get to 'So, funny story about how we met—'?"

"I don't think you want me losing sight of why I was wrong to attempt what I did."

"You do know there's a middle ground between forgetting your mistakes and living in the guilt twenty-four hours a day, r—" Revelation stole over Clark's face. "Oh my God, you _actually don't_ know that."

"Clark," Bruce said warningly. He'd had this conversation with enough people in his life.

"I tried to kill you too, you know."

"You weren't trying very hard. I've seen what fighting you in earnest up close is like now. I should have let you talk."

"You're right. You should be all-around better about listening to me. At what point do we get to just work together, and be — around each other?" Clark leaned closer. For a man who'd taken it upon himself to try to rip the Batsuit off of Bruce in a vat of nefarious science, he could muster a bewilderingly shy smile. "Because I'm looking forward to that a lot."

The last time they'd stood this close to each other, they'd been kissing. As Superman, Clark used a lot of product to control his hair, but he'd eschewed that tonight as Clark Kent; his hair was curly and free, and it would yield to Bruce's fingers if he reached up to touch it.

He really hoped that was deliberate.

"The rock is called kryptonite," Bruce said. "I own all of it. I scoured the metahuman black market, every LexCorp site, the bottom of the Indian Ocean — if there's more out there, it's from a source I don't know of."

Clark's posture relaxed, but he didn't move away. Bruce felt the body heat he radiated like a premonition of what it would be like to have Clark pressed against him again, and held tight to the edge of the counter to keep his hands to himself. "Jeez," Clark said, "you were really worried about more Kryptonians showing up. Or me coming back to life? When I saw that you'd hidden the ship—"

"You coming back to life was not — a possibility I entertained. The ship is encased in lead to keep it from dumping radiation into the Gotham water table, not to hide it from you."

"Okay. And the reason you had a lead box for your toolbelt all ready to go for today is...?"

Bruce winced. "I'd hoped you wouldn't put that together."

"Look, I'm not offended. If things had gone worse today, we might have needed it. Since it sounds like you've got plenty to spare, can you put together a lead box with a catch that's on a timer?"

"I still have the plans for the grenades I used on you," Bruce said, slowly.

"Okay, but bigger."

"Right, and the target hasn't got lungs, so dispersion won't be effective," Bruce said, warming to the subject. "What we want is a single large piece of kryptonite in a shielded case that you can open with a remote control — _and close_ , so you can collect it, or reposition it. Just leaving it somewhere near Pluto only creates a new set of problems. If it has some rudimentary propulsion—"

"This got complicated fast." Maybe it was too soon to think of that note in Clark's voice as fondness.

"I can have something drawn up by the end of the evening." Bruce straightened up from the edge of the counter to look for something to write on, but stopped in his tracks when Clark caught him by the hand.

The breath left him. He half-turned and Clark's gaze ensnared him. Clark's thumb snuck up the cuff of Bruce's shirt, along the tendon of his wrist; for once, they were skin to skin with hardly any production.

"What if you did that tomorrow," Clark said, "and tonight we had dinner, instead?"

"I don't think there _is_ dinner here," Bruce said vaguely. A shiver ran up his arm. His fingers curled against nothing.

"Someone with fancy handwriting — so, Alfred? — left you some Tupperwares in the fridge, actually, but that's not what I meant." Clark pressed his lips together; he glanced down as though gathering himself, then up at Bruce again with that damned bashful smile of his. "I don't really know how to do this."

" _Date_?"

Clark rolled his eyes. "Date _you_. You're inconceivably rich, I can't be seen in public yet, and I have no idea what a nice evening looks like for you."

"No particularly hard hits to the face, knees, or small of the back."

"See, I'm not sure I can provide that."

Bruce's own laugh surprised him. Clark reeled him in and kissed him again, finally.

When he'd dressed, Bruce had unthinkingly put on a three-piece, as though he might find himself addressing the board this evening. There were as many as ten layers of fabric between his skin and Clark's, in places — but not a scrap of armor, and he found himself amazed by the ability of wool and silk and cotton to transmit sensation. This was what it felt like when Clark inhaled while they were chest to chest. That was how Clark's hand felt slipping under Bruce's suit coat and up his back. 

And this was how Clark's hair felt between the fingers of Bruce's ungauntleted hand, without the chill of a slab or the wet of a recent shower in it. Bruce's other hand was still in Clark's, and Clark was still stroking it as they kissed, still holding him gently by the wrist as his thumb explored each knuckle and the lines of Bruce's palm with a deliberacy that reminded Bruce he had a great deal to learn about Clark sexually. Clark already knew more about Bruce's proclivities than Bruce preferred to let on, but fucking someone he barely knew in a tank of resurrection fluid while semi-conscious might not be a strong representation of what Clark was usually like in bed.

 _Bed_. That was right. Here Bruce was, ready to suck Clark off on his kitchen counter, as though they weren't in a tiny open-plan house where no one was ever more than thirty feet from the bedroom. At a desk down in the cave would be one thing, but the bed was _right there_.

He began to pull away, but Clark either wasn't expecting that or didn't feel like stopping; his arm across Bruce's back was immovable. Bruce made a quick involuntary sound, and his heart kicked against his ribs. He hadn't let himself hope for this.

Clark jerked back from him — just inches, just far enough to search Bruce's face with his gaze. His lips were parted, his eyes speculative. His arm still trapped Bruce thrillingly against his body, and Bruce gained a whole new awareness of his wrist still caught in Clark's hand, the stroking fingers that could turn to iron at any moment.

Bruce swallowed, with difficulty. His pulse throbbed in his groin. It was too soon to be this hard, and there was no chance Clark couldn't feel it against his hip.

 _Say something_ was just about to win out over _kiss him again and hope for the best_ when Clark snatched Bruce up off his feet and carried him toward the bedroom without a word.

Bruce's breath came harshly. It was a terrible hold, one that just about anyone should have been able to break or slip — but when he levered at its weaknesses, Clark ignored him, and when he tried to twist out of it, Clark merely adjusted his grip and walked on. Bruce wasn't just weaker than Clark, he was _irrelevant_ when pitted directly against Clark's strength in close quarters. 

He fought Clark every step of the way to the bedroom. It was unwise and he knew it — vigorous struggle at this stage seemed likely to turn into apology or, worse, conversation — but each moment of ineffectual resistance made him crave the next. But Clark didn't hesitate, just held Bruce tighter and tighter until there would most definitely be bruises; he was better at reading Bruce now than he had been back when Bruce's lust had looked to him like simple fear, and the sounds Bruce was making in his throat were certainly not fight noises.

Clark flung him facedown on the bed and was on him before Bruce could turn over. He straddled Bruce's thighs and gripped him by the hair, then deflected Bruce's elbow. Bruce had thought Clark would use his free hand to pin the offending arm, but he slipped it under Bruce's body instead. Clark ran his palm down along Bruce's stomach and past his belt, until he found the bulge of Bruce's erection and cupped it.

Bruce thrust convulsively against the pressure of Clark's hand. In the tight space between Clark and the bed he had very little leverage, but Clark obliged him, rubbing the flat of his hand along the length of Bruce's cock through his pants. Boxed in like this by Clark's body, Bruce could feel Clark's breath on his neck, and every time he drew his hips back he could feel Clark's cock hardening against his ass.

God, Clark really was in this with Bruce, not just humoring him or experimenting. Bruce reached back and dug his fingers into Clark's thighs as though to pull Clark closer, though he could not pull Clark, and Clark could hardly be closer to him — but Clark ground his hips down against Bruce anyway, forcing Bruce's cock more firmly against his palm until the pressure inched up toward Bruce's pain threshold. Bruce made some choked affirmative noise into the duvet, which became a curse when Clark shoved Bruce down just a fraction of an inch more. He'd feel that when he jerked off tomorrow — or better yet if Clark jerked him off or, oh God, blew him, running his teeth along the soreness his own fingers had left.

"You're always wearing so much," Clark said, into the strip of skin between the back of Bruce's collar and his hairline. Clark's baritone voice reverberated throughout Bruce's body. He was stroking Bruce very much in earnest through his pants; this wasn't how Bruce had envisioned himself coming tonight, but he was tensely ready to oblige if Clark wanted to pursue this. Actually, he would be obliging whether Clark wanted him to or not if this kept up. "You're finally out of your armor, but I think you've got more clothing on right now than I own."

Bruce replied with a shaky, throaty sound. No, he could do better in this conversation than moaning and fucking Clark's hand. "You're supposed to want to take it off me," he said hoarsely.

Clark made a sharp little noise and bit the same bare patch of skin his mouth had just rested against. For someone of Clark's strength, it might just have been a surprised nip, but it made Bruce jackknife with pain and then come, just as violently.

He bucked in the cage Clark had made of his body, clutching at Clark's thighs, at his ass, at the sheets beneath them. Clark still had Bruce by the hair; Bruce grabbed for the hand mindlessly and held it in a grip that would have bruised a normal man. The friction of Bruce's wet boxers became uncomfortable quickly, but Clark's other hand was still stroking him and he'd be damned if he did anything other than thrust into Clark's palm for as long as he could.

As Bruce began to cool down, Clark kissed the back of his shoulder and slipped off the bed. He ran his hand down the back of Bruce's leg as he went; it sent a shudder all through Bruce.

Okay, it had seemed like Clark was doing pretty well for himself rubbing against Bruce's ass, but maybe they were playing a longer game. Maybe he wanted something out of the nightstand, which he couldn't have reached without either standing or crawling across the expanse of the bed; Bruce would be more than happy with that, as soon as he'd had a moment to recover. Bruce kicked off his shoes and pushed himself up onto his knees. His heart was slowing, but he was still pleasantly shaky, and hot inside his many layers.

There was no blood on on his neck, when he reached up to feel it. Just the deep impressions of Clark's teeth, which would soon blossom into a bruise.

"How's your neck?" said Clark, who hadn't moved from behind him. All right, not the nightstand.

Bruce half-turned to look at him. If Clark wanted the view from behind, he could have it. He pressed his fingers against the mark on his neck, pointedly, and felt his still mostly-hard cock jerk in his pants.

Clark's gaze flicked down Bruce's body momentarily. His erection was obvious. His mouth was wet, his eyes brilliant. God, why the fuck wasn't he on the bed where Bruce could touch him. Clark could be coming right now. Bruce had spent so much time reliving it, that perilous moment of Clark's pleasure when Bruce had skated so close to utter destruction. He wanted to make Clark come every way a person possibly could.

But Clark didn't approach. Maybe he just wanted to be seduced back into Bruce's handjob radius, but— Bruce ran that last exchange through his head again, from a different angle. He'd thought Clark was gloating, but he could also just have been asking.

It was the first time he'd hurt Bruce deliberately.

"Have you done this before?" said Bruce.

"You know for a fact that I've had sex at least once," Clark said, but his smile had gone a little shy again. That was a no.

Okay. If Bruce had learned anything about Clark this week, it was that he'd be acting a lot pissier if he was having a crisis about what he'd just done. Bruce just needed to either coax or provoke him a little, and things would proceed. That sounded fun.

Bruce shrugged out of his jacket, rolling his shoulders slowly as they emerged into the light of his bedside lamp. When the coat was down to his elbows, he brought his hands together behind his back and plucked at his cuffs until the whole thing slid off his arms, then tossed it onto the floor. He made eye contact, pointedly.

Clark watched avidly. He circled the bed. Bruce had had this dream, kneeling on a platform in a dim room while Clark stalked around him, in both erotic and unerotic editions. Clark wasn't trying to seem dangerous; Bruce knew well what that looked like. He just _was_ dangerous, and even now Bruce could not forget it — would not want to forget it. Clark was a virtually unstoppable alien threat, and right now it was all for Bruce.

He started in on his cufflinks. He was still wearing perhaps a hundred separate garments, counting accessories and adjusting for frustration; if Clark felt Bruce was too clothed, he would have to do something about it himself if he wanted the problem solved before dawn.

It took about a cufflink and a half to break Clark. He came closer until his knees touched the edge of the bed, and set about unscrewing Bruce's collar bar. The line of his mouth wavered as though he were thinking about laughing at himself.

Bruce inhaled and tipped his head back when Clark's knuckles brushed his neck. Clark got sidetracked at once into touching Bruce's throat, tracing first the shape of Bruce's airway with his fingertips and then the transverse ridges of cartilage with his thumb. Without looking, Bruce tossed his cufflinks toward roughly the spot where his jacket had fallen. They'd been the only things he was wearing that he cared about keeping safe; he was ready for anything now.

Clark closed his hand around Bruce's throat slowly, watching it move as though it were someone else's limb. Bruce took a deep eager breath, expecting to be choked, but all Clark did was hold Bruce's throat and explore it slowly with his thumb. The bolt of recognition that ran through Bruce made sweat prickle down his back: this was how it had felt for Clark to search his neck for just the right spot to snap it. Not that Bruce had never touched himself thinking about it, but the last time Clark had done this, the danger had been profoundly real.

The mattress sank under Clark's weight when he rested a knee on it. He tossed Bruce's collar bar away, in the same direction that Bruce had tossed the cufflinks. "What happened the night you brought me back?"

Bruce froze. What the fuck. "We've been over this twice," he said, not as flatly as he'd meant to.

"I wasn't in the tank to start off, right? You carried me over."

"I — yes...."

"Like this?" Clark released Bruce and looped an arm around his shoulders. He flung his weight at Bruce, and when Bruce swayed backwards with it, Clark twisted and brought his knees up. The part of Bruce that still couldn't intuitively understand that Clark was able to fly also could not allow Bruce not to catch him before he fell — and there Clark was, in his arms again.

He weighed less than he had. He weighed much less than he _should_ , if what he'd said about keeping a hundred pounds of compressed air in his lungs was true — he must have been floating just a little, making himself light in Bruce's arms. But a live body's weight always felt less than a dead one's. A living Clark could curl inward against Bruce's chest instead of lolling in his grasp. Bruce remembered that vividly, how different it had been to carry Clark when he was unconscious rather than dead, and how his head had naturally rested on Bruce's shoulder.

"Like this," Bruce agreed, with a dry tongue.

Clark was intent on Bruce's face. "And when you dropped me in the tank, I pulled you in—"

"No," Bruce said. "I stepped in with you, I — lowered you, I didn't drop you."

Some combination of tenderness and surprise crossed Clark's face. He reached up to touch Bruce's jaw. Bruce was feverishly aware of his own bare neck and the two inches of space Clark's hand would have to cross to close on it again. "And when I came to, I tried to kill you," Clark said apologetically.

Bruce jerked his chin in an approximation of a nod. "You had me by the neck. You pushed me under the liquid—"

He was on his back at once. The bed bounced under them with the suddenness of it. The fight rose in Bruce unbidden. Not his playful struggle of earlier, when he had resisted Clark just for the thrill of failing, but a moment of effort so sincere and desperate that he briefly forgot that nothing he did in this context could work. He punched Clark in the side, which made very little impression, and simultaneously reached up to peel Clark's hand off his throat.

 _That_ worked. It required so little strength that he overshot, inadvertently yanking Clark's hand out to arm's length. Both of them stopped to stare at this phenomenon. Clark's gaze gradually slid sideways until it met Bruce's.

Damn him, he was holding back.

Clark inhaled, and Bruce had a horrible feeling that he was about to explain himself.

"Are we doing this or not?" said Bruce.

And they were off again. Clark swatted Bruce's hand away and pinned him to the bed by his throat. He rose up over Bruce as though he needed the leverage, forcing Bruce down into the mattress with his weight and impossible strength, and when Bruce clawed at Clark's hand again, it was as effective as punching him had been. His grip didn't block Bruce's airway or cut off the blood to his brain, as it easily could, but it did force his head up and back; Bruce couldn't see Clark anymore, only feel him, the heat and weight of him, the pulse of his erection against Bruce's hip.

Just as an experiment, Bruce went for where he judged Clark's eyes must be; Clark caught his wrist and pinned it above his head. If Clark hadn't been holding the edge of the tank with his other hand when this had happened — when it had happened _for real_ — it would have played out the same way: Clark wouldn't have had to let go of Bruce's neck to deflect him; Bruce would never have been able to mount a distraction; and Clark would have snapped Bruce's neck without a second thought.

Bruce arched between Clark's body and the bed, and Clark thrust down against him as though Bruce had intended just to press up against Clark for friction, not get the leverage for a throw he had no hope of making. It spun Bruce's head. Their first time through this, Clark hadn't been aroused at this stage; he probably hadn't recognized Bruce yet, let alone having given any thought to sex.

Just four days ago, Clark had sat at Bruce's kitchen table and told Bruce that he'd enjoyed fucking him. As much as that thought had haunted Bruce in the intervening time, he hadn't entertained the idea that it wasn't just the fucking that Clark enjoyed, but the whole experience.

He wasn't sure what Clark got out of this. He clearly wasn't using his full strength, so it wasn't about not having to restrain himself — but maybe just having to restrain himself a _different amount_ was enough; or it wasn't about simple strength, but about holding a life entirely in his hands; or it was about Bruce himself in one way or another, his eagerness, or making Bruce as helpless as he had once made Clark, or reveling in the gap between what Bruce's instincts and training told him to do and what he could actually accomplish in a fight against the goddamn Superman.

Bruce arched again, to get free, to get closer, and Clark rubbed their bodies together with a groan. Bruce's erection had mostly subsided in the aftermath of his orgasm and it wasn't back yet; the friction of his wet boxers against his oversensitive cock was more uncomfortable than pleasurable, for the time being, but he thrust up against Clark anyway just to feel him thrust back and hear the sounds that came from him.

"Did you fight me like this?" said Clark. His voice quaked. He never seemed to get short of breath, but he was managing his breathing wrong and had to gulp air before he could add, "When did you kiss me?"

Adrenaline seized Bruce's tongue; he almost told Clark to go fuck himself, as though this were a forcible interrogation in an alley and not dirty talk. " _Fffff_ —" He bit the rest of it back, just barely. "I tried to punch you — you restrained my hand, took your hand off my neck — gave me an opening—" His blood was up so high he had to fight himself for each word.

"I just let go of you?" said Clark, disbelievingly.

Bruce snarled, "If you weren't an alien it would be like fighting a fucking child—"

Clark's hand tightened just enough to make speech impossible. He bent over Bruce and kissed him, deeply and sumptuously, exactly like someone who had kissed Bruce a few times and had begun to know his mouth and what he liked. When Bruce committed to it immediately — when Bruce showed that this was just as effective a way to shut him up — Clark's hand relaxed, and the pressure on Bruce's airway eased.

This was approximately when he'd let himself touch Clark, back in the tank. It was challenging to remember that, at the time, he'd been trying to hold back, looking for exit, trying to maintain some sort of propriety with where he put his hands on Clark and how much he allowed to happen.

Well, Bruce had a hand free now. He put it directly on Clark's ass, which flexed under Bruce's fingers — and maybe _because_ of Bruce's fingers, slipping along its contour and between Clark's thighs. Bruce might functionally be wearing much less, but Clark's denim seemed to disguise his body much more to Bruce's hands than the slick, clingy fabric of his Kryptonian suit had.

Clark pulled back from kissing Bruce just enough to speak. "And then?"

"You started trying to rip my suit," Bruce said dizzily into Clark's mouth, "so I—"

"Like this?" 

Clark released Bruce's wrist and caught a handful of Bruce's waistband, hooking his fingers through Bruce's belt and pants and boxers. Bruce heard his belt buckle snap in Clark's grip; then Clark tore all three garments off Bruce's body. The motion seemed effortless, like Bruce had been wearing wet paper, but he felt his clothing tighten against his ass and thighs just before the seams popped and the fabric gave way, and knew something of the tremendous force it took to make a gesture like that seem so casual. Clark tossed away Bruce's ruined pants and then yanked Bruce's vest and shirt open in a spray of buttons.

"No, I distracted you with a handjob," Bruce panted, as the cool air hit his wet cock and Clark's jeans chafed his bare thighs.

"Oh," Clark said; he sounded like he was biting back a laugh. "Well, it's not too late."

Damned if Bruce was going to let that slide. Clark seemed surprised to be taken seriously, but he didn't stop Bruce from yanking his belt open and fumbling with the button of his jeans — oh, to be superhumanly strong. He did massage Bruce's throat a little, squeezing just enough to introduce little interruptions into Bruce's breathing, but that could have been encouragement as easily as it was a threat, and was probably both.

Bruce had never gotten his hand on Clark's bare cock during the prototypical version of this act, but what Clark didn't know wouldn't require Bruce to deprive himself. He slipped his hand into Clark's jeans and found him, hot and smooth and pulsing; Clark made a noise in his throat and crumpled into Bruce, burying his face in Bruce's shoulder and trapping Bruce's hand and cock between their bodies. He made a circle of his fingers, and Clark thrust into it urgently. It would've been easier with lube; Clark didn't seem to care.

Clark's hand worked on Bruce's throat in time with his thrusts, squeezing and relaxing, and Bruce found himself giving quick staccato moans every time the pressure let up and airflow resumed. The oversensitivity of his cock was starting to flip around again, become the pleasant kind, and the friction of Clark's jeans against it made Bruce's hips jerk upward for more.

He remembered thinking desperately, in the tank, that Clark would come like this, and then they could both compose themselves and sort things out with each other later. That seemed like a very real possibility now too, from the way Clark moved, from how his cock twitched in Bruce's grip — but it was a double-edged sword now, when there were a hundred other things Bruce wanted to feel or do.

Bruce tried, but he couldn't turn his head enough to kiss Clark's ear. Instead he said, between his own moans and the moments when Clark's hand cut off his breath, "I helped you — unzip my suit, and you — put your fingers in me." Clark's hand relaxed, and it became easier to get through a sentence. "You seemed like you were planning ahead, that's why I thought you might be lucid."

The movement of Clark's hips slowed. He sounded mortified. "No, I probably just wanted to."

Bruce's skin went hot. "Is that true in general, or—" He cut himself off when a shudder ran through Clark's body. Precome slicked his hand. "I keep supplies in the nightstand," Bruce said.

"I know — do you need more time? I can wait—"

" _No_ , are you joking, _fuck me_."

Clark released Bruce's throat, yanked Bruce's hand out of his pants and dived for the nightstand.

There was a lot in the nightstand. Bruce hadn't thought to hide it from Clark and his privacy-demolishing senses during Clark's previous visits to the house and cave, and it was a little late now to be worrying about it. As it turned out, the only consequence of Clark pawing through Bruce's sex paraphernalia was that he came back with a bottle of lube and a bashful expression.

"How would you feel about using the vibrator sometime? It's a vibrator, right?"

Bruce propped himself up on his elbows and crossed his ankles. He wasn't far enough along to be frustrated by any brief delay between him and an orgasm; desire and anticipation were pleasant thrums through his body, and for the moment he was happy just to be on a bed with Clark, watching him come nearer. "You can use it on me right now if you want."

In addition to never getting short of breath, Clark didn't seem to flush during sex, but his face went red now. "Thanks," he said — God, what a ridiculous person, "but for now...."

"Come back here," Bruce said.

Clark pushed Bruce's knees apart again, crawled up between his legs and kissed him. He cupped Bruce's jaw, and for a moment Bruce expected Clark's hand to resume its grip on his throat — but the lube would require two hands, at least for a moment. Unless Bruce helped, but Clark hadn't asked, so Bruce could do whatever he pleased with his hands. He buried them both in Clark's hair and kissed him long and slow, like they had all the time in the world.

"So it was me who unzipped you," Clark said into Bruce's mouth. Bruce made a vague affirmative noise, and Clark hooked his fingers into the neck of Bruce's undershirt. He drew a long rent down the front, and when the hem resisted a little, flicked it apart with his thumb; the halves of Bruce's shirtfront fell to either side, as though it had simply been unbuttoned like his overshirt and waistcoat.

Bruce paused. When he tilted his head down to look at Clark's handiwork, their foreheads touched. "The Batsuit actually opens down the back."

"Well, I tried," Clark said, shoved Bruce down flat.

Bruce had brought his knees in until they touched Clark's hips, just for the hell of it, just to be touching him, but Clark pushed them wide again, then popped open the cap on the lube and slicked up his fingers.

He'd struck Bruce as the sort of person who started with one finger and had to be cajoled through every subsequent stage of the process, but he started with two, pushing them in deep and fast. The pain was as unexpected as it was familiar, and it arched Bruce off the bed for a moment. Bruce tangled his hand in Clark's hair again, not just to revel in its texture but to have something to yank on. The lube was cool, but Clark's fingers were warmer than a human's would have been; it was sharp and interesting in the moments before the temperatures equalized.

Clark drew out a little, slow now, and found Bruce's prostate with his fingertips. Bruce had begun to half-expect another performance like the one in the LexCorp building, where he had forced an orgasm out of Bruce so quickly and so violently that Bruce's body had required further placation before it believed they were done; but Clark explored gently this time, and the pleasure welled up at a pace Bruce could keep up with. Sweat prickled on his neck and stomach, and his erection leapt fully back to life.

"Oh my god," Clark said hollowly. He sounded more like a man watching a flood destroy his home than someone in the midst of sex, but as he fucked Bruce slowly with his fingers and watched Bruce roll his hips for more, he said it again, in the same devastated voice: "Oh, my god." Bruce experienced a strong intuition of what his sexual future looked like.

Clark pushed another finger into Bruce. He hadn't really relaxed enough for the first two yet, and this one surprised a sound of pain out of Bruce as it opened him wider. Clark's fingers pressed harder at his prostate, until Bruce writhed and groaned. Bruce breathed in quick sharp gasps; tremors ran down his thighs and up his stomach. He reached for his cock, but Clark caught his wrist and slammed it into the bed above Bruce's head, so powerfully the mattress shook beneath them again — which was essentially as good; Bruce bucked against the restraint, squeezing Clark's hips with his knees.

He made a noise, when Clark yanked his fingers out, that would have been pretty embarrassing if he hadn't bitten it off quickly; it turned into a long hiss. "Sorry," Clark said. What he'd wanted his hand for was jerking his pants down to his hips; his cock emerged finally, red and a little wet at the head, and so hard Bruce could see Clark's pulse in it. Bruce had a moment to reflect again, with a certain amount of disbelief, that even _it_ was handsome, and then Clark hitched Bruce closer to him atop the bedclothes.

Oh fuck. Oh yes.

"You flipped me over first," Bruce said, groping for the lube with his free hand.

"I know."

It was a good thing Clark was there to keep things moving, because that would have stopped Bruce in his tracks otherwise. "How much do you remember?"

There was still lube on Clark's hand, and he stroked it onto himself, but that wasn't going to be enough; Bruce managed to get in there with the bottle before the gap between their bodies closed too much for him to reach, and Clark spread the additional lube gamely along the length of his cock as well.

"You were so turned on," Clark said, and blushed, because rubbing the head of his cock against the ass of a man he intended to fuck was fine, but apparently talking about the fact that Bruce liked it was a bit much for Clark. "I think about that ... constantly. At the time — I was pretty disoriented — I thought we must be madly in love, if you were that turned on."

He pushed into Bruce slowly, so that Bruce felt every instant of himself giving and stretching around Clark — and then as soon as the head was in he pulled back, and Bruce got to feel it all again. He wasn't sure if the goal was just to watch the show a second time, or if Clark was afraid putting his entire cock in Bruce might be too much sensation; Clark didn't show signs of exertion, but he trembled as he entered Bruce again, and Bruce thought there might not be long to go.

"I meant," Bruce gasped, "more like where on the timeline—"

"I know," Clark said again; his voice shook as much as the rest of him did. "I thought something drastic must have happened between us, because you were just — it was like your skin was on fire." He thrust all the way into Bruce this time, with torturous slowness.

Bruce yanked Clark's shirt from his pants so he could shove his free hand beneath it and dig his fingers into the bare skin of Clark's back during this process. Clark lifted Bruce's hips from the bed with his own free hand, and the second full-length thrust dragged his cock very thoroughly along Bruce's prostate; Bruce kicked involuntarily at the bed, snarled curses at the ceiling. Fuck, maybe it wouldn't be Clark first after all.

"God, you _haunted_ me," Clark was saying. His breath caught, and he put his face to Bruce's chest for a moment. "It was so hard not to want you."

He was fucking Bruce in earnest now, in long slow strokes with just enough force at the end to rattle Bruce's bones a little. It wasn't any clearer to Bruce this time if this was just how Clark liked it, or if he was doing it for Bruce's benefit — but by design or coincidence, every thrust sent a bright new shudder of bliss through Bruce.

"There's something I haven't told you," Bruce said, and then gritted his teeth; talking had loosened up his vocal cords enough that he'd almost let a little cry slip out.

Clark gave a tiny breathless laugh. "Doesn't that go without saying?"

"I jerked off about an hour later, thinking about you fucking me up against the shower wall so hard it broke."

For a moment, when Clark let go of Bruce's wrist and hip simultaneously, Bruce thought he was just surprised — but then he felt the jerk of Clark's cock inside him. Even in this, Clark was appallingly stronger than any mere human, and Bruce could feel the full progression of Clark's orgasm, from the hard initial pulses to the gentler petering-out. He went rigid at first, but he was a little less cautious this time than last, and resumed fucking Bruce as soon as the worst of the danger was past — chasing a noise of startled pleasure out of Bruce, who had thought he would be a mere spectator.

Clark didn't fall asleep immediately either, though when he relaxed atop Bruce, Bruce did find himself checking. But no, when Bruce touched the back of Clark's head, he tipped his face up toward Bruce and kissed him, and he made a low pleased sound in his chest that Bruce felt all through his body.

He was still hard inside Bruce, and Bruce's erection was trapped pleasantly between his body and Clark's. Bruce could work with this, even if Clark intended to check out right away — but as soon as Bruce squirmed a little, Clark pulled out of him, quick enough to make Bruce gasp.

"Fuck," Bruce said, "don't, I want—"

"A blowjob?"

"... yes," Bruce said.

Clark made the most perfunctory show of kissing his way down Bruce's body that Bruce had ever experienced and then made up for it immediately by taking Bruce's entire cock down his throat in one go. Well, that probably answered Bruce's questions about whether Clark had any real prior experience with men. He sucked Bruce with a merciful lack of finesse — Bruce didn't have the patience for an artful blowjob right now, not with the leading edge of his orgasm just about ready to break over him. Clark gave him exactly the wet heat and unmerciful suction he wanted, and that would definitely have been enough, even if he hadn't slipped his fingers back into Bruce's ass.

Bruce slammed his head back against the mattress and fucked Clark's throat with complete shuddering abandon. Some flair crept into the blowjob as Bruce subsided; Clark pulled off of Bruce's cock and licked him lavishly, stroked him, kissed his thighs and the head of his cock. It would have been infuriating before his orgasm, but it was entirely pleasant right up until oversensitivity crept up on him again and he had to push Clark away.

He was flat on his back; Clark crawled up into the space between Bruce's side and his slack arm, and rested his head on Bruce's chest. He wasn't winded or sweaty like Bruce, but he unwound against Bruce with a certain heaviness that might have indicated Kryptonians did, in fact, get tired.

Bruce still had his socks on; not his sexiest look. Clark was almost fully clothed. There were pillows on this bed, and if he crawled far enough Bruce could put his head on one. There were sheets he could be under, if he were prepared to put in the work.

He touched Clark's hair instead, and the powerful curve of his back, and felt him breathe. They'd saved the world today, together.

"Anyway, that's how it went," Bruce said, and Clark's warm body shook with laughter beside him.

**Author's Note:**

> I like to imagine Ra's al-Ghul watching this all go down on the evening news and spitting out his coffee like, "They used it for _what_?!"
> 
> I can't overstate how deeply Liodain's prompt affected me. I spent probably hours looking at it as I worked on this story, which is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever written. Oh, you've painted this gorgeous, atmospheric, emotional scene? Let's get real detailed about what being submerged in that tank feels like. Let's use the word "flesh" ... _a lot_. Let's go to space! I had a grand time. Lio has been very patient with me, and I am astounded by her followup art, which definitely does not reflect her scanning through this story and drawing every scene in which someone's clothing is torn. If you haven't looked at it yet, [now's an amazing time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14822792/chapters/34302047).
> 
> I would also like to beg the forbearance of any aeronautics engineers who've read this. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
> 
> [TKodami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami) did an absolutely heroic amount of work on this story as my sounding-board, cheerleader and beta. There aren't enough thanks in the world. Any remaining errors are my own.
> 
> Funnily, this art was created, and the story outlined, before Justice League came out, so any resemblance to the events of that film is just because Liodain and I are _that good_.
> 
> If you like to reblog things, you can do that [here](http://oneiroteuthis.tumblr.com/post/174482569513/title-project-lazarus-artist-steals-thyme), as well as taking a look at the Tumblr banner Lio made from the second art piece.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[ART] Project Lazarus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14822792) by [liodain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liodain/pseuds/liodain)




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